Preface for Instructors
Alternate Tables of Contents
By Theme
By Paired Readings
By Rhetorical Mode
By Purpose
By Chronological Order
Introduction for Students: Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process
*Student Essay: Jonathon Schaff, “Dangerous Duality: How Racism Splits Us in Two”
Sherman Alexie, The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
Maya Angelou, Graduation
Gloria Anzaldúa, How to Tame a Wild Tongue
Barbara Lazear Ascher, On Compassion
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Dave Barry, Lost in the Kitchen
William F. Buckley, Why Don't We Complain?
* Rachel Carson, The Obligation to Endure
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria
* Jared Diamond, The Ends of the World as We Know Them
* Joan Didion, On Morality
* Annie Dillard, Seeing
Frederick Douglass, Learning to Read and Write
Barbara Ehrenreich, Serving in Florida
Lars Eighner, On Dumpster Diving
Stephanie Ericsson, The Ways We Lie
* Stephen Jay Gould, Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs
Langston Hughes, Salvation
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
* Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: Games
Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
Maxine Hong Kingston, No Name Woman
* Verlyn Klinkenborg, Our Vanishing Night
* Audre Lorde, The Fourth of July
Nancy Mairs, On Being a Cripple
Malcolm X, Learning to Read
* Bill McKibben, Curbing Nature's Paparazzi
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain
Bharati Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
* Plato, Allegory of the Cave
* Michael Pollan, What's Eating America
Richard Rodriguez, Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood
Mike Rose, “I Just Wanna Be Average”
* Scott Russell Sanders, The Men We Carry in Our Minds
* Eric Schlosser, Kid Kustomers
* David Sedaris, A Plague of Tics
* Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments
Brent Staples, Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Amy Tan, Mother Tongue
Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Sojourner Truth, Ain't I a Woman?
Sarah Vowell, Shooting Dad
* Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
E.B. White, Once More to the Lake
Marie Winn, Television: The Plug-In Drug
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth
Documentation Guide
Glossary of Writing Terms