| Preface for Instructors |
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v | |
| Alternate Tables of Contents |
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xxix | |
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Selections Arranged by Theme |
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xxix | |
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Selections Arranged by Common Rhetorical Modes and Patterns of Development |
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xxxviii | |
| Short Essay Contents |
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xlix | |
| Introduction for Students: The Writer's Presence |
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1 | (7) |
| On Writing: Practical Advice from Successful Writers |
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8 | (15) |
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8 | (6) |
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Dealing with Procrastination |
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10 | (2) |
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12 | (1) |
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12 | (2) |
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14 | (2) |
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16 | (4) |
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18 | (2) |
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20 | (3) |
| 1 Personal Writing: Exploring Our Own Lives |
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23 | (260) |
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What Is Personal Writing? |
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25 | (1) |
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Strategies for Establishing Your Personal Presence |
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25 | (3) |
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Strategies for Turning Your Story into a Compelling Narrative |
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28 | (2) |
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Strategies for Writing Literary Prose |
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30 | (3) |
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Reading Personal Essays: A Checklist |
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33 | (1) |
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"What's Your Name, Girl?" (Classic) |
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34 | (6) |
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"Every person I knew had a hellish horror of being 'called out of his name.' |
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It was a dangerous practice to call a Negro anything that could be loosely construed as insulting because of the centuries of their having been called niggers, jigs, dinges, blackbirds, crows, boots, and spooks." |
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Notes of a Native Son (Classic) |
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40 | (20) |
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"The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. |
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As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. |
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It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. |
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And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son." |
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The Writer At Work: James Baldwin on Black English |
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57 | (1) |
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"The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. |
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It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience." |
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60 | (7) |
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"My dad walked, hitched rides, and rode in empty boxcars when he went from Arkansas to Washington State in 1934, looking for work. |
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I don't know whether he was pursuing a dream when he went out to Washington. |
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I don't think he dreamed much." |
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67 | (10) |
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"My father's Navy check provided us with financial security and a standard of life that the factory workers envied. |
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The only thing his money could not buy us was a place to live away from the barrio-his greatest wish, Mother's greatest fear." |
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The Writer At Work: Judith Ortiz Cofer on Memory and Personal Essays |
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75 | (1) |
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"Much of my writing begins as a meditation on past events. |
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But memory for me is the 'jumping off' point; I am not, in my poetry and my fiction writing, a slave to memory." |
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Learning to Read and Write (Classic) |
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77 | (6) |
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"The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. |
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I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery. |
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I loathed them as being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men." |
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The Land of No: Love in a Class-riven America |
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83 | (8) |
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"How could I tell her how differently we'd been raised? |
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In the circular driveway in front of her house were five Porsches her father had shipped over from England to sell here for a profit, something she told me was called the 'gray market.' |
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In my family, the market was where we went for food, if there was enough money to buy some." |
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The Writer At Work: Andre Dubus III on the Risks of Memoir Writing |
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88 | (1) |
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"In my hometown of Haverhill, Massachusetts, the mill town where I grew up and the setting for Townie, I'm told it's referred to as 'The Book.'" |
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91 | (5) |
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"I swallowed a small, sour piece of self-knowledge: I was the sort of person who, instead of weeping or shouting or praying during a crisis, thought about something from a textbook." |
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The Writer At Work: Anne Fadiman on the Art of Editing |
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95 | (1) |
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"If you're not a writer, this sort of compulsiveness may seem well nigh pathological. |
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You may even be thinking, 'What's the difference?' |
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But if you are a writer, you'll realize what a gift the editor gave his old friend." |
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96 | (9) |
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"The 'kitchen' I'm speaking of now is the very kinky bit of hair at the back of the head, where our neck meets the shirt collar. |
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If there ever was one part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the kitchen. |
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No matter how hot the iron, no matter how powerful the chemical, no matter how stringent the mashed-potatoes-and-lye formula of a man's 'process,' neither God nor woman nor Sammy Davis Jr., could straighten the kitchen." |
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105 | (6) |
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"We stood in the street, uncertain and afraid, until a house across from us began to sway and then with a rending motion fell almost at our feet. |
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Our own house began to sway, and in a minute it, too, collapsed in a cloud of dust." |
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111 | (5) |
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"'A real man isn't afraid of anything.' |
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He has heard people say this his whole life, even when he was a kid, even back when he was still trying, desperately trying, to be happy as a girl-and later, too, after he told people the truth of his gender ('Just trying to help,' they would say)-so he knows it must be true: He shouldn't be afraid of anything." |
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116 | (4) |
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"I've stuttered for more than sixty years, and the mysteries of the encumbrance still catch me up: being reminded every morning that it's engrained in my fiber, although I had forgotten in my dreams. |
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Life can become a matter of measuring the importance of anything you have to say." |
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The Writer At Work: Edward Hoagland on What an Essay Is |
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119 | (1) |
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"Essays are how we speak to one another in print-caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter." |
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120 | (4) |
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"Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. |
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Waves of rejoicing swept the place. |
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My aunt threw her arms around me. |
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The minister took me by the hand and led me to the platform." |
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The Writer At Work: Langston Hughes on How to Be a Bad Writer (in Ten Easy Lessons) |
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123 | (1) |
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"Have nothing to say, but use a great many words, particularly high-sounding words, to say it." |
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124 | (5) |
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"We're considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans, Mother says. |
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But of course most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes." |
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129 | (7) |
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"I had never flown before, so the shifting and tilting cityscape of Beijing viewed from the air was exhilarating. |
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However, the Boeing had a peculiar smell that nauseated us. |
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It was a typical American odor, sham and artificial, like a combination of chemicals and perfumes." |
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136 | (3) |
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"Three years before my mother died, I decided not to speak to her again." |
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139 | (3) |
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"Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don't walk barehead in the hot sun." |
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The Writer At Work: Jamaica Kincaid on "Girl" |
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141 | (1) |
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"This mother in 'Girl' was really just giving the girl an idea about the things she would need to be a self-possessed woman in the world." |
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If You Are What You Eat, Then What Am I? |
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142 | (9) |
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"But I have never been fond of moong dal. |
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At my mother's table it is the last thing I reach for. |
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Now I worry that this antipathy toward dal signals something deeper, that somehow I am not my parents' daughter, not Indian, and because I cannot bear the touch and smell of raw meat, though I can eat it cooked (charred, dry, and overdone), I am not American either." |
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151 | (3) |
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"When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. |
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What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life." |
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My Life as a Muslim in the West's "Gray Zone" |
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154 | (5) |
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"Imagine if, after every mass shooting in a school or movie theater in the United States, young white men in this country were told that they must publicly denounce gun violence. |
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The reason this is not the case is that we presume each young white man to be solely responsible for his actions, whereas Muslims are held collectively responsible. |
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To be a Muslim in the West is to be constantly on trial." |
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159 | (8) |
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"If I allow myself to be honest, my private salvation, which cannot and should not be anybody's concern, is that I disowned my native language." |
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167 | (3) |
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"It is now my understanding that diversity is not, as I had once thought, a characteristic of life. |
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It is, instead, a condition necessary for life. |
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To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on." |
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170 | (11) |
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"First, the matter of semantics. |
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I choose this word to name me. |
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I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are 'handicapped' and 'disabled.' |
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I made the choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so." |
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The Writer At Work: Nancy Mairs on Finding a Voice |
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180 | (1) |
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"The question I am most often asked when ! speak to students and others interested in writing is, How did you find your voice?" |
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181 | (6) |
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"We had been stripped bare here in America, our lives confined to small towns and urban suburbs. |
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We had sacrificed precisely those things that can never be compensated for or repaid-parents, siblings, culture, a memory to a place that dates back more than half a generation. |
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Leave Your Name at the Border |
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187 | (8) |
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"Ours, then, were names that stood as barriers to a complete embrace of an American identity, simply because their pronunciations required a slip into Spanish, the otherness that assimilation was supposed to erase. |
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What to do with names like Amado, Lucio, or Elida?" |
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Student Essay: It's Not the Name That Matters |
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191 | (1) |
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"Whenever he can, Cody avoids calling me Milos. |
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Sometimes I feel sorry for him, because no matter how hard he tries, he always mispronounces it. |
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Either he says 's' at the end instead of 'sh' or makes the 'o' sound too long. |
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I believe that every time he tries to say 'Milos' (pronounced Mee'-litish) and a different word comes out of his mouth, he curses both my name and the people who gave it to me." |
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Shooting an Elephant (Classic) |
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195 | (8) |
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"When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick-one never does when a shot goes home-but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd." |
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The Writer At Work: George Orwell on the Four Reasons for Writing |
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201 | (1) |
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"Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose." |
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From Citizen: An American Lyric |
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203 | (2) |
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"The four police cars are gone. |
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Your neighbor has apologized to your friend and is now apologizing to you." |
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205 | (5) |
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The Graphic Memoirist At Work: Marjane Satrapi on the Language of Words and Images |
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208 | (6) |
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"When you watch a picture, a movie, you are passive. |
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Everything is coming to you. |
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When you are reading comics, between one frame to the other what is happening, you have to imagine it yourself. |
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So you are active; you have to take part actually when you read the story." |
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210 | (4) |
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"Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. |
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'Sometime me cry alone at night.' |
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'That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. |
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Much work and someday you talk pretty. |
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People start love you soon. |
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214 | (3) |
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"My mother had to shop very carefully, as my father was on strike. |
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She was a waitress, and her paycheck and tips barely sustained us. |
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One day, while she was weighing prices, a promotional display for the World Book Encyclopedia caught my eye." |
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Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space (Classic) |
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217 | (6) |
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"She cast back a worried glance. |
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To her, the youngish black man-a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket-seemed menacingly close. |
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After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest." |
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The Writer At Work: Another Version of Just Walk on By |
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221 | (1) |
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"She looked back at me once, then again, and picked up her pace. |
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She looked back again and started to run. |
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I stopped where I was and looked up at the surrounding windows. |
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What did this look like to people peeking out through their blinds?" |
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Small Man in a Big Country |
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223 | (6) |
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"Americans did seem to me at times like a different species, one that had evolved over generations into supreme behemoths. |
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229 | (3) |
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But it's a name you must slip into and wear like a second skin, for on the other side of that name, your parents are alive and waiting." |
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Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self (Classic) |
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232 | (7) |
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should be marked "Classic." |
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"Where the BB pellet struck there is a glob of whitish scar tissue, a hideous cataract, on my eye. |
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Now when I stare at people-a favorite pastime, up to now-they will stare back. |
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Not at the 'cute' little girl, but at her scar." |
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239 | (10) |
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"The communities I grew up in were dangerous and poor, and it was the common opinion of nearly everyone I knew that, when all was said and done, whites were to blame. |
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Whites discriminated against us. |
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Whites denied us decent housing. |
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Whites caused us to have high unemployment and failed schools. |
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Crack had come from whites, and so too had AIDS. |
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Whites, in some vague and yet indisputable way, made the winos drink and gangbangers kill." |
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The Writer At Work: Jerald Walker on Telling a Good Story |
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242 | (1) |
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"The paranoia created by racism, it seems to me, is often worse than racism itself, in the way that not knowing something is often worse than knowing. |
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The phrase, 'Please, Doc, just give it to me straight!' comes to mind." |
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Student Essay: Isn't Watermelon Delicious? |
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243 | (1) |
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"Isn't it true that race is just one ingredient in a large and complicated recipe? |
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Why must it be the main ingredient and define all the other areas of life? |
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I know that my life is about much more than being black, and, for that matter, being black is about much more than my skin color." |
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249 | (7) |
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"As women, we should not have to accept that some men want to rape and kill us. |
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If a man tries to violate one of us, we should shoot for the heart. |
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And publicize the hell out of it. |
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Spread the word: Women are armed and dangerous." |
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Once More to the Lake (Classic) |
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256 | (8) |
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"Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fade-proof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the juniper forever and ever, summer without end." |
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The Writer At Work: E.B. White on the Essayist |
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262 | (1) |
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"There is one thing the essayist cannot do...he cannot indulge himself in deceit or in concealment, for he will be found out in no time." |
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Eight Simple, Short Words |
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264 | (8) |
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"I pinched myself: Was I still alive? |
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How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? |
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All this could not be real. |
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A nightmare perhaps....Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in the room of my childhood, with my books." |
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272 | (11) |
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Thomas Chatterton Williams |
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"What, exactly, remains of the American Negro in my daughter? |
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Is it nothing but an expression playing around the eyes; the slightest hint of lemon in the epidermis? |
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Is it possible to have a black consciousness in a body that does not in any way look black?" |
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| 2 Expository Writing: Shaping Information |
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283 | (222) |
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What Is Expository Writing? |
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285 | (6) |
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Strategies for Sharing Information |
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286 | (1) |
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Strategies for Analyzing Information |
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287 | (1) |
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Strategies for Interpreting Information |
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288 | (2) |
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Reading Expository Essays: A Checklist |
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290 | (1) |
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291 | (8) |
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"Ethnoracial inequality is not the only social inequality that matters. |
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In 2013, the nearly 20 million white people below the poverty line in the United States made up slightly more than 40 percent of the country's poor. |
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Nor is prejudice the only significant motive for discrimination: ask Christians in Indonesia or Pakistan, Muslims in Europe, or LGBT people in Uganda. |
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But more than a century after his London address, Du Bois would find that when it comes to racial inequality, even as much has changed, more remains the same." |
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299 | (5) |
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"The first time a student asked me about my 'grading system,' I was nonplused-and a bit intimidated. |
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It was an innocent question, but I heard it as a challenge: I was a 25-year-old graduate student teaching my first section in an English-literature class at the University of Virginia, and I really didn't know what my grading system was. |
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Nor did I feel comfortable saying, 'Well, it's like Justice Stewart's definition of pornography, I simply know an A paper when I see it.'" |
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304 | (13) |
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"Debates over vaccination, then as now, were often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power." |
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317 | (7) |
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"Borders everywhere attract violence, violence prompts fences, and eventually fences can mutate into walls. |
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Then everyone pays attention because a wall turns a legal distinction into a visual slap in the face." |
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324 | (6) |
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"It is appalling that Americans know so little about one another. |
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It is appalling that many of us are so narrow-minded that we can't tolerate a few people with ideas significantly different from our own. |
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It's appalling that evangelical Christians are practically absent from entire professions, such as academia, the media, and filmmaking. |
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It's appalling that people should be content to cut themselves off from everyone unlike themselves." |
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From Between the World and Me |
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330 | (9) |
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"If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. |
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Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. |
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But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later." |
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The Writer At Work: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Culture of Scholastic Achievement |
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337 | (1) |
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"I mostly thought of school as a place one goes so as not to be eventually killed, drugged, or jailed. |
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These observations cannot be disconnected from the country I call home, nor from the government to which I swear fealty." |
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339 | (7) |
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"Smiles are associated with joy, relief, and amusement. |
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But smiles are by no means limited to the expression of positive emotions: People of many different cultures smile when they are frightened, embarrassed, angry, or miserable." |
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346 | (7) |
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"We are in America because our lives meant nothing to those in power in the countries where we came from. |
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Yet we come here to realize that our lives also mean nothing here." |
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353 | (6) |
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"I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. |
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We know it because we feel it. |
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I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. |
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To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior." |
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The Writer At Work: Joan Didion on Why I Write |
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357 | (1) |
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"In many ways writing is the act of saying !, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind." |
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359 | (12) |
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360 | (1) |
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"Early one morning several teachers and staffers at a Connecticut grade school were in a meeting. |
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The meeting had been underway for about five minutes when they heard a chilling sound in the hallway. |
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(We heard pop-pop-pop, said one of the staffers later.)" |
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361 | (3) |
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"We were supposed to be driving to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, but he said just drive around for a while, my prescriptions aren't going anywhere without me, so we just drove around." |
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364 | (17) |
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"[ R]ight about then I started paying attention to how we fetishize animals as symbols for our athletic adventures, and I have become only more attentive since, for I have spent nearly thirty years now working for colleges and universities, and you could earn a degree in zoology just by reading the college sports news." |
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The Writer At Work: Brian Doyle on the Pleasures and Craft of Writing and Reading |
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367 | (1) |
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"As my dad says, learn to ask a question and then shut your piehole and listen. |
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People will tell amazing stories if you let them and invite them and be silent and dig them." |
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On Dumpster Diving (Classic) |
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371 | (12) |
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"Students throw out many good things, including food. |
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In particular they tend to throw everything out when they move at the end of a semester, before and after breaks, and around midterm when many of them despair of college. |
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So I find it advantageous to keep an eye on the academic calendar." |
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The Writer At Work: Lars Eighner on the Challenges of Writing While Homeless |
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381 | (1) |
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"I do not think I could write a narrative that would quite capture the unrelenting ennui of homelessness, but if I were to write it, no one could bear to read it. |
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I spare myself as much as the reader in not attempting to recall so many empty hours." |
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383 | (3) |
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"The changes in Barbie's body may have arisen out of the company's desire to do good; mostly, though, they arose from its need to do well. |
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This was that oldest and most American of things: cultural change by way of capitalism." |
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Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted |
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386 | (11) |
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"The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. |
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Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. |
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Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with." |
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397 | (3) |
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"It's precisely the vagueness of 'they' that makes it a not-so-ideal pronoun replacement. |
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It can obscure a clear gender identification with a blurred one. |
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Think of genderqueer people who are confident in their knowledge of their own gender identity as one that simply doesn't fit the boxes of 'he' or 'she': Calling all of them 'they' can make it sound as if someone's gender is unknowable; it's the grammatical equivalent of a shrug." |
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400 | (4) |
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"In January 1994, there were 700 Web sites in the world. |
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By the end of that year there were 10,000. |
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The combination of personal computers and the Internet had spawned something amazing: anyone could get content from anywhere, distribute new creations everywhere, and enquire within upon everything." |
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404 | (8) |
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"Then he asks for my address and phone number and where I plan to be for the next eighty-nine days. |
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'If there is some unfortunate incident,' he explains, 'some terrorist attack,' (he's sotto voce now) 'then we will know you did it.'" |
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Student Essay: My Homeland Security Journey |
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408 | (1) |
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"My parents tell me now that the FBI was crosschecking our names, and while we waited for hours at the check-in desk, an agent in the Washington, D.C., office verified our identities." |
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412 | (3) |
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"I think of the irony that I fully appreciated that my tree was alive only tust in time to hear that it had died. |
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But it's more than that-my spruce tree was not only alive, it had a life, similar to but different from my own. |
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It passed its own milestones. |
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My tree had its time, and time changed it." |
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415 | (3) |
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"We often think of tattoos as declarations of selfhood: this is what I am, love, believe. |
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But there are other things we might inscribe on ourselves: what we fear, what we hate, what we hope to be but can't yet manage." |
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418 | (8) |
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"I sometimes find myself wanting to speak with the expectant soldier's mother and father. |
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I want to tell them that their son did not die alone in a triage bed-that he was not simply abandoned or left as hopeless in a secluded corner room of a distant combat hospital. |
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I want to assure them that he died in the company of men who stood watch over him as if guarding an entire battalion and that we tried to give everything we could give-that we tried to be more than soldiers or generals or doctors." |
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Everything You Need to Know about Writing Successfully-In Ten Minutes |
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426 | (6) |
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I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers' school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes, which is exactly how long it took me to learn." |
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432 | (8) |
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"Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished." |
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Student Essay: Climate Change: A Serious Threat |
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437 | (1) |
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"Something needs to change. |
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Since less than half of the population of the U.S. is knowledgeable about climate change, education is step one." |
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Our Place in the Universe |
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440 | (8) |
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"Naturalists, biologists, philosophers, painters, and poets have labored to express the qualities of this strange world that we find ourselves in. Some things are prickly, others are smooth. Some are round, some jagged. Luminescent or dim. Mauve colored. Pitter-patter in rhythm. Of all these aspects of things, none seems more immediate or vital than size." |
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Gettysburg Address (Classic) |
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448 | (3) |
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"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." |
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The Writer At Work: Abraham Lincoln's Hay Draft of the Gettysburg Address |
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449 | (1) |
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As the fame of the "Gettysburg Address" continued to grow, Lincoln kept revising the words for an increasingly wide audience that had not been present to hear him speak. |
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451 | (10) |
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"This defiant culture of song, graffiti, and dance, collectively known as hip-hop, has ripped popular music from its moorings in every society it has permeated. |
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In Brazil, rap rivals samba in popularity. |
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In China, teens spray-paint graffiti on the Great Wall. |
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In France it has been blamed, unfairly, for the worst civil unrest that country has seen in decades." |
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From Reading Lolita in Tehran |
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461 | (10) |
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"Teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules. |
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Always, the joy of teaching was marred by diversions and considerations forced on us by the regime-how well could one teach when the main concern of university officials was not the quality of one's work but the color of one's lips, the subversive potential of a single strand of hair?" |
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471 | (7) |
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"If this were a movie, he'd score a perfect 1600 and be off to Princeton on full scholarship. |
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But Harlem isn't Hollywood, and the challenges in real life are infinitely more complex." |
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Why Boys Don't Play with Dolls |
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478 | (3) |
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"Instead of looking at kids to 'prove' that differences in behavior by sex are innate, we can look at the ways we raise kids as an index to how unfinished the feminist revolution really is, and how tentatively it is embraced even by adults who fully expect their daughters to enter previously male-dominated professions and their sons to change diapers." |
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Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good |
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481 | (11) |
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"Wonderful smells drifted through the hallways, men and women in neat white lab coats cheerfully went about their work, and hundreds of little glass bottles sat on laboratory tables and shelves...The long chemical names on the little white labels were as mystifying to me as medieval Latin. |
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These odd-sounding things would be mixed and poured and turned into new substances, like magic potions." |
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492 | (7) |
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"The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women-of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human." |
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The Writer At Work: Rebecca Solnit on Writing "Men Explain Things to Me" |
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497 | (1) |
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"I wrote it in one sitting early the next morning. |
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When something assembles itself that fast, it's clear it's been composing itself somewhere in the unknowable back of the mind for a long time." |
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The Death of the Moth (Classic) |
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499 | (6) |
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"It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life." |
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The Writer At Work: Virginia Woolf on the Practice of Freewriting |
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502 | (1) |
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"I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. |
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I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat." |
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| 3 Argumentative Writing: Contending with Issues |
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505 | (186) |
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What Is Argumentative Writing? |
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507 | (7) |
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Strategies for Presenting the Issue |
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507 | (1) |
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Strategies for Making a Claim |
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508 | (1) |
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Strategies for Building a Case |
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509 | (2) |
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Strategies for Coming to a Conclusion |
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511 | (2) |
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Reading Argumentative Essays: A Checklist |
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513 | (1) |
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Tough Love: Parents and Children |
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514 | (3) |
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"[ M]any Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. |
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I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. |
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All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. |
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The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that." |
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517 | (8) |
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"Do we really need school? |
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I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. |
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Is this deadly routine really necessary? |
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The Careless Language of Sexual Violence |
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525 | (6) |
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"The way we currently represent rape, in books, in newspapers, on television, on the silver screen, often allows us to ignore the material realities of rape, the impact of rape, the meaning of rape." |
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531 | (6) |
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"You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it 'simulates' the feeling of drowning. |
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This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning-or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure." |
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The Declaration of Independence (Classic) |
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537 | (5) |
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." |
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The Writer At Work: Another Draft of the Declaration of Independence |
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541 | (1) |
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with [ inherent and] inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." |
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From The Coddling of the American Mind |
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542 | (4) |
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"What exactly are students learning when they spend four years or more in a community that polices unintentional slights, places warning labels on works of classic literature, and in many other ways conveys the sense that words can be forms of violence that require strict control by campus authorities, who are expected to act as both protectors and prosecutors?" |
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546 | (7) |
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"As love has increasingly become the center of all emotional expression in the popular imagination, anxiety about obtaining it in sufficient quantities-and for sufficient duration-suffuses the population. Everyone knows that as the demands and expectations on couples escalated, so did divorce rates. And given the current divorce statistics (roughly 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce), all indications are that whomever you love today-your beacon of hope, the center of all your optimism-has a good chance of becoming your worst nightmare tomorrow." |
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553 | (5) |
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"If those of us who are trying really hard are still fully enmeshed in the fossil fuel system, it makes it even clearer that what needs to change are not individuals but precisely that system. We simply can't move fast enough, one by one, to make any real difference in how the atmosphere comes out." |
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558 | (8) |
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"Given that I am the kind of black person who is often termed 'articulate,' it may seem surprising that I spend much of my life feeling quite thick of tongue. |
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I am one of those unfortunate black people who sound white. |
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It is, of all things, a social handicap." |
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566 | (5) |
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"Good feminists, in short, do not diet. Or if they do, they don't talk about it." |
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The Trouble with Diversity |
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571 | (9) |
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"But classes are not like races and cultures, and treating them as if they were-differ-ent but equal-is one of our strategies for managing inequality rather than minimizing or eliminating it. White is not better than black, but rich is definitely better than poor." |
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580 | (4) |
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"From the moment we declared our independence from the domination of British rule, we have included the people's right to pursue happiness as one of the primary privileges of our citizens and the responsibility of our government. Life and liberty are addressed to one degree or another by our executive, legislative and judicial branches, but our potential for happiness has lagged far behind." |
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The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery |
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584 | (7) |
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"The questions raised about plastic surgery often have a moralistic hue. Is cosmetic surgery a wasteful frivolity, an exercise in narcissism? Does the pressure for alteration of face and body fall more heavily on women because of endemic sexism? And are coercive racist stereotypes at work in the trend among black women to thin their noses and among Asian women to 'Westernize' their eyes?" |
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Student Essay:A Response to Camille Paglia's "The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery" |
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587 | (1) |
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"Although Paglia's argument is in many ways sensible, there are a few points I take issue with, such as the idea that Hollywood has perpetuated a sexist ideal of women through plastic surgery." |
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591 | (10) |
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"But a better question may be, 'How bad was the world in the past?' |
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Believe it or not, the world of the past was much worse. Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species." |
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Student Essay: Steven Pinker and the Question of Violence |
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597 | (1) |
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"But there are still some major issues to consider when evaluating Pinker's position. For instance, what exactly constitutes violence in this argument?" |
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601 | (7) |
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"We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets-and market values-have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us." |
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608 | (7) |
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"Why are people increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem." |
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The Singer Solution to World Poverty |
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615 | (6) |
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"In the world as it is now, I can see no escape from the conclusion that each one of us with wealth surplus to his or her essential needs should be giving most of it to help people suffering from poverty so dire as to be life-threatening. That's right: I'm saying that you shouldn't buy that new car, take that cruise, redecorate the house, or get that pricey new suit. After all, a $1,000 suit could save five children's lives." |
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The Trouble with Self-Esteem |
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621 | (9) |
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"Shifting a paradigm is never easy. More than 2,000 books offering the attainment of self-esteem have been published; educational programs in schools designed to cultivate self-esteem continue to proliferate, as do rehabilitation programs for substance abusers that focus on cognitive realignment with self-affirming statements like, "Today I will accept myself for who I am, not who I wish I were." |
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The Writer At Work: Lauren Slater on Writing Groups |
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629 | (1) |
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"Probably everything I write is kind of a co-construction of what I think and what other people think and I just don't see myself as being someone who's pulling ideas out of her own head." |
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A Modest Proposal (Classic) |
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630 | (8) |
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"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout." |
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638 | (6) |
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"We're fighting for more than a band name: we're fighting for the right of self-determination for all minorities. |
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Things like this are the subtle indignities that people of color have to face every day: slights that don't seem big enough to make a fuss over yet continually remind us that challenges to the norm (read: white, homogenous culture) are not welcome." |
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644 | (5) |
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"Research shows that when people are together, say for lunch or a cup of coffee, even the presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) does two things. |
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First, it changes what people talk about-it keeps conversation light because the phone is a reminder that at any point, we might be interrupted, and we don't want to be interrupted when we're talking about something important to us. Second, conversation with phones on the table, or even phones on the periphery of our vision, interferes with empathic connection." |
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649 | (16) |
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"The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in .. . whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof." |
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The Writer At Work: Another Version of "Consider the Lobster" |
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664 | (1) |
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"I'm not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here-at least I don't think so. I'm trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest." |
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665 | (6) |
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"The world is a troubled, dangerous place, at best. Unfairly dangerous for young Americans in free fall, growing up too fast or not growing at all, deprived of the love, guidance, positive example, the material, intellectual, and moral support of fathers negotiating the perils with them." |
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671 | (5) |
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"There is privilege, yes, in taking the path of least resistance. But there is also cowardice and complicity. I want to come to this question with more fierceness, with more outrage and courage." |
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Stories Hollywood Never Tells |
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676 | (15) |
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"When I began reading and studying history, I kept coming across incidents and events that led me to think, Wow, what a movie this would make. I would look to see if a movie had been made about it, but I'd never find one. It took me a while to realize that Hollywood isn't going to make movies like the ones I imagined. Hollywood isn't going to make movies that are class-conscious, or antiwar, or conscious of the need for racial equality or gender equality." |
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| Index of Authors and Titles |
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691 | |
