Vivid, approachable readings explore complex interdisciplinary ideas. The alphabetically arranged readings are longer than those found in typical composition readers (12–15 pages) to provide students access to complex ideas. Yet most were written for a general audience, allowing students to engage with those ideas without stumbling on exclusionary language. The selections represent cross-disciplinary work — such as an economist thinking about politics or an anthropologist thinking about education, putting students into conversations with public intellectuals. For instance:
- Thomas Friedman’s "The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention" offers a novel theory of how high-speed commerce builds global ties — and prevents war.
- Diana Taylor’s "False Identifications: Minority Populations Mourn Diana" investigates globalization, race, celebrity, art, and mourning by asking why the world cares so much about a dead English princess.
- Kenji Yoshino’s "The New Civil Rights" calls for a new legal framework for thinking about individual rights through common causes.
A focus on contemporary concerns and students’ roles in conversations about them. With issues such as information literacy, collective thinking, AIDS prevention, the role of media in a democratic society, and the nature of diversity within community,
Emerging asks students, themselves emerging as agents in the public sphere, to consider and deal with crucial challenges.
Innovative apparatus helps students develop the skills needed to remain competitive, reflective, and critically self-aware. The introduction presents six key skills of academic success and global citizenship: the ability to read critically, think critically, synthesize, argue, support, and revise. Several types of questions follow each selection, including unique "Language Matters" questions, which ask students to employ grammatical concepts as analytical tools to aid a critical understanding, and innovative "Exploring Context" assignments, which ask students to use the Web to research context for the readings.
Assignment sequences direct students’ work on sustained academic projects. Ten assignment sequences offer a variety of projects based on four or five readings, with each sequence providing the work for an entire semester. For instance, readings for Sequence One, "Rites/Rights of Passage: Identifying the Self," examine rituals at the intersection of the personal and the social, and the assignments in this sequence explore the role that such rites play in individual lives and the community at large. The sequences help students work critically with multiple readings, connecting and distinguishing key ideas, and ask students to join the dialogue.