Bazerman; Speech Acts, Genres, Activity Systems

The features, functions, and student activity of textbooks are often very similar. It is the job of all textbooks to guide a student along the content in a particular course that student it taking. A textbook is written in order to not only help the student understand the material, but to also offer more information than what a teacher may give in a classroom lecture.
The function of the Ancient Rhetoric for Contemporary Students textbook is to give students an inside look at where writing, and the way that our culture writes now, came from and developed over time. It contains several chapters about different aspects of writing from Chapter one's criteria of ancient rhetoric all the way to chapter twelve's guidelines for style, memory, and delivery of oral content. The textbook is written in a way that is easy to read and easily accessible to all of its part which is a way to make it much easier for students to learn the necessary material. The book is broken down into chapters of detailed titles, with different labeled sections in each chapter; there is a table of contents and a glossary in the back to reiterate important terms.
Every text book for every subject is quite similar in setup and design, however, the layout of materials within each individual textbook serves a very different purpose.