Containing over 110 selections by contemporary and classic writers, PROSE MODELS is a rhetorical reader that covers the major elements of paragraph, essay and methods of development with an emphasis on Argument and Persuasive writing.

Part I: ORGANIZING THE ESSAY. 1. Topic Sentence, Thesis, and Unity. Gretel Ehrlich: Obituary . Gretel Ehrlich: About Men. Mark Twain: The Shape of the River. George Orwell: Shooting an Elephant. Peggy and Pierre Street: A well in India. Eric Sevareid: Velva, North Dakota. 2. Main and Subordinate Ideas. Lytton Strachey: Queen Victoria at the End of Her Life. Sally Carrighar: The Blast Furnace. David Holahan: Why Did I Ever Play Football? 3. Order of Ideas. E.B. White: In an Elevator. Leonard Kriegel: The Purpose of Lifting. Joan Didion: Marrying Absurd. 4. Beginning, Middle, and End. Susan Allen Toth: Mountain Day. Calvin Trillin: BenandJerry's. 5. Transitions. Lewis Thomas: Communication. Mary E. Mebane: Mary. Part II: DESCRIPTION, NARRATION, EXPOSITION. 6. Description. John McPhee: The World's Largest Pile of Scrap Tires. W. S. Merwin: The Buick. Mary Helen Ponce: Hoyt Street. Ronald Takaki: The Barrio. 7. Narration. James Salter: Flying. Eudora Welty: Learning to See. Esmeralda Santiago: The American Invasion of Macún. 8. Example. E.B. White: New York. Tom Wolfe: Thursday morning in a New York Subway Station. Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux: Discipline—To What End? 9. Classification and Division. John Holt: Kinds of Discipline. Allan Nevins: The Newspaper. Garrison Keillor: Hoppers. 10. Definition. Carol Bly: Monkeying. Lawrence M. Friedman: Crime. Philip Hamburger: The Sooners. Casey Miller and Kate Swift: "Manly" and "Womanly". Herbert L. Gans: The Underclass. Irving Lewis Allen: Newspapers. 11. Comparison and Contrast. Marie Winn: Televisions and Reading. Edward Hoagland: City People and Country People. Edward T. Hall: the English and the Americans. Richard Lanham: Digital Literacy. 12. Analogy. Loren Eiseley: What Makes a Writer. Loren Eiseley: The Cosmic Prison. Michio Kaku: The Education of a Physicist. 13. Process. Mark Twain: Sounding. Jearl Walker: Outdoor Cooking. John Richards: How the Spider Spins Its Web. 14. Cause and Effect. John Brooks: The Telephone. Marvin Harris: Why Nothing Works. James Trefil: The Growth of Cities. Part III: MATTERS OF STYLE: DICTION. 15. Usage. William Least Heat Moon: In the Land of Coca-Cola. Newsweek: Being Cool. Robert Sullivan: A Memo from Dad. 16. Tone. Mark Singer: Osu! William Finnegan: Surfing. 17. Imagery. Rachel Carson: The Rocky Shores. 18. Figurative Language. Diane Ackerman: Watching a Night Launch of the Space Shuttle. George Lackoff and Mark Johnson: Time Is Money. 19. Concreteness. Bailey White: Mortality. George Plimpton: Fireworks. 20. Euphemism and Jargon. Perri Klass: Learning the Language. Sydney J. Harris: Nipping Clichés in the Bud. Russell Baker: Little Red Riding Hood Revisited. Part IV: MATTERS OF STYLE: THE SENTENCE. 21. Addition and Modification. Jane Jacobs: Hudson Street. 22. Emphasis. Mark Twain: The Steamboatman. 23. Loose and Periodic Sentences. John Steinbeck: The Turtle. Annie Dillard: At Tinker Creek. 24. Climax. John Updike: My Grandmother. 25. Parallelism. Ernesto Galarza: Boyhood on the Sacramento Barrio. 26. Antithesis. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Nonviolent Resistance. 27. Length. Lewis Thomas: On Matters of Doubt. Part V: ARGUMENT AND PERSUASION. 28. Inductive Reasoning. Vicki Hearne: Max into Maximilian. Edward Tenner: Revenge Theory. Richard Moran: More Police, Less Crime? Wrong. William Zinsser: The Right to Fail. Ellen Goodman: Wait a Minute. Brooks Atkinson: The Warfare in the Forest Is Not Wanton. John Henry Newman: The End of Education. Norman Cousins: Who Killed Benny Paret? Stephen L. Carter: Computer Viruses. Alan Wertheimer: Statistical Lives. Roger D. Stone: Why save Tropical Rain Forests? Herbert Hendin: Students and Drugs. 29. Deductive Reasoning. Syndey J. Harris: Freedom and Security. H.L. Mencken: Reflections on War. Kenneth B. Clark: The Limits of Relevance. Karl L. Schilling and Karen Maitland Schilling: Final Exams Discourage Learning. William Raspberry: Who Deserves the Death Penalty? 30. Controversy. Supreme Court Ruling on the Communications Decency Act, "Reno v. ACLU," June 26, 1997. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Internet: The Lost Fight. George F. Will: Sex, Fat, and Responsibility. Patrick D. Maines: The New Censorship. William J. Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker: Wal-Mart's Free Choice. Joshua Micah Marshall: Will Free Speech Get Tangled in the Web. Stanley C. Brubaker: In Praise of Censorship. Mark H. Moore: Prohibition and Drugs. Alan M. Dershowitz: The Case for Medicalizing Heroin. Charles B. Rangel: Legalize Drugs? 31. Interpretation of Evidence. I. Bernard Cohen: What Columbus "Saw". Deborah Tannen: Asymmetries. Leanne G. Rivlin: A New Look at the Homeless. 32. Methods of Persuasion. Anna Quindlen: Homeless. Hilary De Vries: "I Think I Will Not Forget This". George F. Will: "Extreme Fighting" and the Morals of the Marketplace. N. Scott Momaday: The Morality of Indian Hating. Michael Dorris: For Indians, No Thanksgiving. Anonymous: Who Am I? Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal. Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address. Garr Wills: The Gettysburg Address. Part VI: ESSAYS ON WRITING. Mark Twain, The Art of Composition. John Ciardi, What Every Writer Must Learn. William Zinsser, Simplicity. Walker Gibson, Stuffy Talk. Glossary. Index.