Preface to the Second Edition

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”

-e.e. cummings, 1938

We read e.e. cummings as suggesting that being a person who asks questions opens us to a world of interesting experiences and the possibility of beautiful answers. We hope that this book will help you focus on questions rather than answers.

This book, The Ask: A More Beautiful Question, is an Open Educational Resources (OER), an open access, freely available textbook. We appreciate the opportunities that OER invites – to work with multiple authors, to create instantly accessible texts, to offer high quality, low cost books to students and faculty excited about research and writing. But OERs are also weird. It takes an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and resources, to ensure the quality of OER texts. The labor of publication is often invisible in final products, and we appreciate how OER work sheds light on this collaborative, complicated process.

This second edition of The Ask: A More Beautiful Question builds on the work of our colleagues, offering a new organization that mirrors MTSU’s ENGL 1020 curriculum, enhanced accessibility, new readings, and revised course objectives in line with the True Blue Core. We encourage you to also check out The Muse: Misunderstandings and Their Remedies, the text designed for MTSU’s ENGL 1010 course; The GEM: The Gen Ed Magazine, which features award-winning student work composed in True Blue Core English courses; and the Gen Ed English Faculty Guide, which offers teaching materials aligned with the True Blue Core English curriculum.