Academic and Argumentative Writing

Academic Writing: Readings for Multidisciplinary Thinking
Interdisciplinary and lengthy, these challenging readings fuse the personal and the academic, requiring students to grapple with complex ideas and sustained arguments.
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Across the Curriculum: Readings by Writers in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Hard Sciences
Well-written and accessible, these essays focus on topics from the broad disciplinary fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, law, and medicine.
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Issues under Debate: An Argument Reader
Classic and contemporary arguments organized into pro-con pairings or multiselection casebooks, encourage students to formulate their own positions on issues such as censorship, gay rights, drug legalization, and torture.
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Provocative Pairings: Essays for Comparison
Thematically related readings are organized into pairings—some pro/con, others less sharply opposed—to ask students to analyze and respond to issues such as capital punishment, the environment, reasons for writing, and language and cultural identity.
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Literature Anthologies

Forms of Literature: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
Short stories, poems, and plays in this three-genre anthology, are organized to exemplify the basic elements of literature, from allegory and character to imagery and irony to style and theme
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Literature for College Writers: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays
This anthology augments the stories, poems, and plays of Themes of Literature with the additional genre of essays.
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Themes of Literature: Fiction, Poetry, and Drama
This three-genre anthology is arranged around timeless themes—emotions and decisions, art and beauty, the spiritual and the supernatural, and mortality and ultimate questions.
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Women's Literature: An Anthology
A diverse selection of short stories, poems, plays, and essays showcases writing in English by women from the sixteenth century to the present.
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Rhetorical Readers

Patterns for Composition
This modes-based reader features classroom-proven favorites, from Judith Ortiz Cofer’s contemporary narrative “Casa” to Suzanne Britt’s comparative “Neat People vs. Sloppy People” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s classic argument “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
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Short Models for Composition
This rhetorically arranged collection of shorter readings—most fewer than three pages—contains excellent models by well-known writers such as Peter Elbow, Katha Pollitt, and Langston Hughes.
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Single-Theme Readers

African American and Caribbean Writing: An Anthology
Organized by genre, this reader showcases works by African American and Caribbean writers from Frederick Douglass to Jamaica Kincaid.
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Natural Acts: Readings on Nature and the Environment
Showcasing a range of personal as well as scientific responses to the natural world, this reader raises questions about our relations to and responsibilities toward the environment.
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Readings on Food
This collection of essays and poems features numerous perspectives on food-related subjects—from the French paradox to a Japanese paradigm—by noteworthy authors including Michael Pollan, Morgan Spurlock, and Laura Fraser.
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Readings on Gender
This reader encourages students to reexamine their assumptions about feminism, gender roles, and sexuality, with essays by powerful voices such as those of Gloria Steinem, Nawal El Saadawi, and Cornel West.
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Readings on Work
This reader features a variety of perspectives on work—with personal writing, reportage, analytical and theoretical essays, and even some fiction and poetry—by noted authors such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Sherman Alexie, Stephanie Coontz, and Thomas L. Friedman.
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The Challenge of Great Ideas
Introducing students to some of the most powerful thinkers in Western Civilization from Plato to Peter Singer, the essays in this reader are arranged thematically—on topics such as government, justice, education, the mind, science, nature, and ethics.
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The Power of Language: Essays on Literacy, Writing, and Reading
This reader invites students to explore the how language relates to literacy, culture, and composition.
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Thinking about Popular Culture: A Reader for Writers
Focusing on such topics as advertising, consumption, brands, and icons, this reader asks students to engage with and question the media-saturated world around them.
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Thematic Readers

Clusters for Composition: Related Readings for Writers
Tightly focused clusters of readings elicit critical thinking and writing on a wide breadth of provocative topics, both popular and unusual, such as environmentalism, class, giving advice, obligations, and the service economy.
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Short Essays on Popular Themes
Themes such as work, popular culture, and identity tie together the readings in this collection of shorter works.
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Themes for Composition: A Reader for College Writers
Classic and contemporary works arranged in broad thematic chapters—such as race and culture, gender, and education—encourage students to compare their own experiences with those of others.
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Value Readers*

Arguing about Issues: Controversies for Writers
This price-friendly reader offers a variety of pro-con pairings and casebooks of arguments—both classic and contemporary, including animal rights, the environment, and standardized testing.
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Challenging Ideas: Essays from Essential Thinkers
Organized by topics including education, science, and the mind, this thematic collection asks students to explore the writings of prominent thinkers of Western Civilization—from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King. Jr. and Thomas Jefferson to Karl Marx.
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Composing Patterns: A Rhetorical Reader for Writers
Featuring composition-classroom favorites such as Marie Winn's "Television: The Plug-In Drug" and Bruce Catton's "Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts," this modal reader challenges students to read and practice various patterns of composition.
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Exploring Diversity: Readings on Race, Class, and Gender
Thematic chapters in this price-friendly reader, including "Constructing Masculinity," "Marking Gender," and "Reducing Identities to Stereotypes," encourage students to examine the commonalities and differences between people of diverse backgrounds.
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Questioning Gender: Readings for Writers
This collection of influential voices—from Sojourner Truth and John Updike, to Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid, to Margaret Atwood and Julia Alvarez—explores questions of gender and sexuality, asking students to reassess their basic assumptions about both.
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*Net prices begin around $22.