Synopses & Reviews
Designed to startle prospective writers into realizing that they can produce interesting essays, this reader devotes equal coverage to canonical essays, contemporary essays, and student essays.
Features
-- Fifty-five essays are organized into three parts: classic essays, popular press essays, and student essays.
-- Student-authored pieces make writing feel authentic to students, and were chosen for the interesting decisions made by their authors about form and voice.
-- Essays were selected for their singularity of voice, their accessibility, and their variety.
-- Most essays are only two to three pages, allowing each piece to be easily covered in a single class meeting.
-- Each essay is followed by questions on content and rhetoric, vocabulary, and writing prompts. These strategies will help students bridge the reading- writing connection.
Table of Contents
Part 1: CLASSIC ESSAYS. Norman Cousins: Who Killed Benny Paret? Mark Twain: Two Ways of Seeing a River. Chief Seattle: We May Be Brothers. George Orwell: A Hanging. Virginia Woolf: The Death of the Moth. E. B. White: The Family Which Dwelt Apart. Mary Sarton: The Rewards of Living a Solitary Life. Martin Luther King, Jr.: I Have a Dream. Loren Eiseley: The Angry Winter. Annie Dillard: The Deer at Providencia. Eudora Welty: Learning to Listen. Lincoln Steffens: A Miserable Merry Christmas. N. Scott Momaday: A Kiowa Grandmother. Norman Cousins: The Right to Die. William Zinsser: Clutter. Judy Brady: I Want a Wife. Susan Allen Toth: The Boyfriend. Natalie Goldberg: The Power of Detail. Zora Neale Hurston: I Get Born. Part 2: POPULAR PRESS ESSAYS. Dorothy Noyes: Senior-Teener: A New Hybrid. Deborah Tannen: The Triumph of the Yell. Elaine Tyler Mary: Women in the Wild Blue Yonder. Brent Staples: Just Walk on By. Judith Viorst: What, Me? Showing Off? Ellen Goodman: Recalling a Father Who Died. Donald Hall: The Embrace of Old Age. Alice Hoffman: The Perfect Family. Mary Cassatt: Mary Gordon. Scott Russell Sanders: News of the Wild. Stanton L. Wormley, Jr.: Fighting Back. John Hockenberry: Limited Seating on Broadway. Anna Mae Halgrim Seaver: My World Now. Anna Quindlen: Our Animal Rights. Constance Grey: The Woods Stalker. Frank Conroy: Running the Table. Paul Gruchow: Home Is a Place in Time. Pico Iyer: In Praise of the Humble Comma. Mary E. Mitchell: Full Circle Lessons. Mohsin Hamid: International Relations. Cynthia Williams: Soul Disposed. Part 3: STUDENT ESSAYS. Brandi Grady Grosz: Leap of Faith. Brenda Salazar: Coon Hunt. Deb Sullivan: In the Garden. Eric Ostrowski: Time Keeps on Slipping. Jeff Hansen: The Key. Joseph Marthaler: Wheels of Perspective. Julie Stuard: A Thousand Words. Karen Krueger: A Girl Needs to Know How to Defend Herself. Katherine Fluke: Writing Rape. Katrina Pink: Another Road: Other Fish to Fry. Kim Denning: One Hour. Liu Wei: Hush! Hush! Ronald Markovich: Feeling Out of Place. Sheree Kiser: Dear Shelley. Stacy Jurgens: Picnics and Milk.