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College Textbooks

The first rule is don’t panic! You don’t need to rush around and buy textbooks before you get to campus. The college book store has what you need, and many courses use online texts which are delivered automatically to your Internet Blackboard account.

The world of college textbooks is tricky, so it is easy to order the wrong thing from Amazon (especially if you try to save money by getting an older edition at a discount). That’s one good reason to wait until you get here to buy your books. Another good reason is that each teacher has a unique textbook list: You cannot assume that the book list for one section of a course will work in another section.

Pro tip:

When you buy books at our bookstore, save your receipt and don’t mark in them until you are really sure you bought the right things. The bookstore will give you full credit for unmarked books you bought by mistake if you have a receipt.

Books for our course

The good news is that our English course doesn’t have any textbooks. Everything is online and free. We have sample essays and readings and we have grammar handbook items, all available through the internet. You can get to them three ways:

  • After you get access to your Blackboard account (usually on the first official day of class), you will find that the course is arranged by weeks, and the readings which are assigned each week are in the folder for that week.
  • Also in Blackboard, there’s a menu item called “Course Content” where you will find all the readings (plus links to other grammar and usage items).
  • At the top of this blog page, you will see a thing with three little lines which look like this: ☰. Click that and a sidebar will open which also has the “Course Content” item.

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