The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition

The Norton Sampler is a rhetorically arranged short-essay reader that provides models and guidelines for writing description, narration, and all the other modes of discourse. The readings are brief, reflecting the length of the essays students are required to write.

From classic texts by writers such as Annie Dillard and E. B. White, to contemporary texts from writers like Barack Obama and Marjorie Agosín, The Norton Sampler includes a range of readings that will delight teachers and engage students. Texts from a range of everyday media--from billboards to coffee mugs--demonstrate that the rhetorical modes play an important role in all the writing and reading that we do.

Now with enough writing instruction that students will not need a separate rhetoric.

An outstanding collection of brief essays providing high-interest models of the rhetorical modes, along with beautifully written instruction that demonstrates its own lessons about good writing.

'W. W. Norton & Company is proud to present the Sixth Edition of The Norton Sampler.\n

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'As a rhetorically arranged collection of short essays for composition, our Samplerechoes the cloth samplers once done in colonial America, presenting the basic patterns of writing for students to practice just as schoolchildren once practiced their stitches and ABCs on needlework samplers.  This new edition shows students that description, narration, and the other patterns of exposition are not just abstract concepts used in composition classrooms but are in fact the way we think\'\"and write.

The Norton Samplercontains 63 carefully chosen readings\'\"classics as well as more recent pieces, essays along with a few real-world texts\'\"all demonstrating how writers use the modes of discourse for many varied purposes.'

Thomas Cooley (PhD, Indiana University) is professor of English at The Ohio State University. In addition to Back to the Lake, he is the editor of The Norton Sampler, The Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the author of several other books, among them Educated Lives: The Rise of Modern Autobiography in America and The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America.