Original Introduction

This collection grew out of my work as a librarian with English instructors at Northwestern Michigan College as they struggled to adapt their composition courses to use Open Educational Resources in order to save their students the cost of an expensive commercial textbook. Composition textbooks include samples of writing that are copyrighted and cannot be printed or shared. This collection is intended to provide instructors with a wide variety of nonfiction examples of good writing that they can use to teach composition.

A smaller collection was my final project for the Creative Commons Librarian Certificate program which I completed in March of 2019.

These essays were collected from online magazines that offer their articles under Creative Commons licenses. A few are from individual authors who generously agreed to give their work an open license in order to share it for this collection.

Each essay has its own license (see Licenses and Permissions for details) but all essays can be shared, copied, printed, and distributed. We consciously created the collection as a Google Doc rather than as a PDF or Word document so that it can be easily shared, linked to, copied, downloaded, and edited without the use of proprietary programs. We envision instructors choosing the essays they want to use, renumbering them, and copying them into customized collections chosen especially for their students.

–Tina Ulrich