Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

NARRATION 1

George Orwell: Shooting an Elephant

Langston Hughes: Salvation

Maya Angelou: Grandmothers Victory

Malcolm X: Coming to an Awareness of Language

David Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day

Martin Gansberg: Thirty-eight Who Saw Murder Didnt Call the Police

Chapter 2

DESCRIPTION

James Baldwin: Fifth Avenue, Uptown

E.B. White: Once More to the Lake

Joan Didion: Marrying Absurd

Judith Ortiz Cofer: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

F. Scott Momaday: Revisiting Sacred Ground

Michael Byers: Monuments to Our Better Nature

Chapter 3

PROCESS ANALYSIS

Diane Ackerman: Why Leaves Turn Color in the Fall

Jessica Mitford: Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain

Richard Marius: Writing Drafts

John (Fire) Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes: Alone on the Hilltop

Edward Abbey: The Serpents of Paradise

Alan Lightman: Smile

Chapter 4

DEFINITION

Susan Sontag: Womens Beauty: Put Down or Power Source?

Jo Goodwin Parker: What Is Poverty?

Ellen Goodman: The Company Man

Gloria Naylor: Meanings of a Word

Tom Haines: Facing Famine

Joe Epstein: The Green-Eyed Monster

Chapter 5

CLASSIFICATION AND DIVISION

Gail Sheehy: Predictable Crises of Adulthood

Donald Hall: Four Kinds of Reading

Kesaya E. Noda: Growing Up Asian in America

Judith Viorst: The Truth about Lying

William Lutz: Doublespeak

Jonathan Lethem: 9 Failures of the Imagination

Chapter 6

COMPARISON AND CONTRAST

Bruce Catton: Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts

Deborah Tannen: Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers

Mark Twain: Two Views of the Mississippi

Scott Russell Sanders: The Men We Carry in Our Minds

Suzanne Britt: Neat People vs. Sloppy People

Virginia Woolf: Shakespeares Sister

Bharati Mukherjee: Two Ways to Belong in America

Chapter 7

EXAMPLE AND ILLUSTRATION

Robertson Davies: A Few Kind Words for Superstition

Edward T. Hall: The Anthropology of Manners

Brent Staples: Black Men and Public Space

Franz Kafka: Letter to His Father

William Zinsser: Clutter

Bailey White: Forbidden Things

John McPhee: Silk Parachute

Chapter 8

CAUSE AND EFFECT

Norman Cousins: Pain Is Not the Ultimate Enemy

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead: Where Have All the Parents Gone?

Philip Meyer: If Hitler Asked You to Electrocute a Stranger, Would You? Probably

K. C. Cole: The Arrow of Time

Paul Salopek: Shattered Sudan

David Ewing Duncan: DNA as Destiny

Chapter 9

ANALOGY

Plato: The Myth of the Cave

Alice Walker: Am I Blue?

Horace Miner: Body Ritual Among the Nacirema

Loren Eiseley: The Cosmic Prison

Annie Dillard: Living Like Weasels

Chapter 10

ARGUMENT AND PERSUASION

ARGUMENT

Economics and Social Responsibility

Barbara Ehrenreich: A Step Back to the Workhouse?

Garrett Hardin: Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor

Jonathan Kozol: The Details of Life

Free Speech

Nat Hentoff: Should This Student Have Been Expelled?

Alan M. Dershowitz: Shouting Fire!

Cloning

Brendan I. Koerner: Embryo Police

James Greenwood and Sam Brownback: Symposium: Should Congress Use Tax Dollars to Fund Therapeutic Cloning?

PERSUASION

Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I Have a Dream

Richard Rodriguez: Bilingual Education: Outdated and Unrealistic

Naomi Shahib Nye: To Any Would-Be Terrorists

Judy Brady: Why I Want a Wife

Medicine Grizzlybear Lake: An Indian Fathers Plea

Bill McKibben: Designer Genes

Chapter 11

MIXED STRATEGIES

Stephen J. Gould: Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs

Amy Tan: Mother Tongue

Lars Eighner: On Dumpster Diving

Andrew Sullivan: This Is a Religious War

Sandra Cisneros: Only Daughter

Ian Frazier: Coyote vs. Acme

Frank Bures: Test Day