I decided to write this workbook in response to the escalating price of textbooks. I found that my students were paying upwards of $60 for a workbook with no more than fifty pages in it, and felt that I could probably write one just as good myself and give it to them for free. For several years I have allowed my students to purchase old editions of Kennan's Counterpoint textbook, and have been pleased that they can normally find copies online for under $10. Other than pagination, the old editions are practically identical to the most recent edition, which now costs more than $120 at retail price.
This workbook is not intended to be a textbook--I still require students to have access to some edition of the Kennan textbook. They may purchase any edition they want, but they also have the option to borrow a copy from me for the entire semester for a nominal deposit, which is returned to them in full when they give the book back to me. If they decide to keep the book then I use their deposit to purchase another copy of the book for loaning to future students.
In recent years I have become fairly involved in the free and open-source software (a.k.a. "FOSS") movement, represented most visibly by the various flavors of the GNU/Linux operating system, but also by smaller projects and developers around the world who are devoted to producing excellent software and sharing it freely with others.
One of the primary tenets of open-source development is that individual users may see the source code and are free to make improvements upon it, but those improvements must be shared back to the community. In that spirit I welcome contributions to this project in the form of corrections, additions or other help. I encourage you to use the workbook as you see fit and to share it freely with anyone who wants it. In return I ask only that you contact me and let me know if you're using it so that I can acknowledge this in the book and so that hopefully my institution's administrators will see my work's value to the academic community.