Samuel Cohen - 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology

Fifth Edition

Edited by

SAMUEL COHEN

University of Missouri

For Bedford/St. Martins

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Acknowledgments

Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on , which constitute as an extension of the copyright page.

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology is a compact, inexpensive collection of classic and contemporary essays, most of which have already proven popular in hundreds of classrooms and with thousands of students. Learning how to read good writing effectively is crucial to learning how to write and think critically and 50 Essays is full of exceptional prose and many opportunities to practice reading, thinking, and writing about it.

50 Essays includes a core of classic essays such as Gloria Anzaldas How to Tame a Wild Tongue, E. B. Whites Once More to the Lake, and Malcolm Xs Learning to Read, accompanied by fresh, recent selections such as Colson Whiteheads The Loser Edit and Lydia Millets Victors Hall. For such a compact volume, 50 Essays represents an extraordinary diversity of voices and genres from polemical exhortations to personal narratives, from speeches to meditations, from nuanced arguments to humorous articles of varied length and complexity. The essays should stimulate ideas for students own writing as they provide sound models for rhetorical analysis.

But 50 Essays is more than just a selection of good readings: it is a versatile and practical collection designed to prompt critical thinking and writing in the composition classroom. For maximum flexibility and ease of navigation, the essays are arranged alphabetically by author, while alternative tables of contents are provided to help instructors shape courses that meet their teaching preferences. For example, one table of contents is organized by rhetorical mode (narration, description, comparison, and so forth); another by rhetorical purpose (personal, expository, argumentative writing); another by theme (ethics, gender, identity, pop culture, nature and the environment, among others); another by pairs and clusters of readings (Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde on Women Speaking to Racism, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Oliver Sacks on Facing Death, Nicholas Carr and Malcolm Gladwell on Mediated Lives, and more); and a final table lists the selections chronologically by the date of the essays composition.

For students, an introduction provides advice on the key skills of active reading, critical thinking, and writing. Terms in bold throughout the introduction refer to a glossary at the back of the book which defines important writing terms, such as audience, evidence, and plagiarism. An annotated model paper shows students how to analyze and work with multiple sources. Headnotes contextualize each reading in its writers own place and time. As an aid to comprehension, the essays themselves are lightly glossed. Several types of assignments follow each reading and provide multiple avenues into it: questions on meaning, on rhetorical strategy, on connections between and among selections, and on ideas for further analysis and research. An up-to-date appendix on MLA-style documentation (covering the 2016 version) also helps students write their own source-based papers.

Sixteen readings are new to this edition, including:

• Essays on critical thinking, language, and writing that help students reflect on their reading and become more thoughtful writers, such as Joan Didions On Keeping a Notebook and Colson Whiteheads The Loser Edit.

• Essays on contemporary topics that invite students to confront timely issues, including concern over police brutality in Ta-Nehisi Coatess The Paranoid Style of American Policing and the damage to society caused by the Love What You Do mantra in Miya Tokumitsus In the Name of Love.

• Essays that critically examine popular culture to make students aware of the arguments going on around them, including Dave Zirins Pre-Game, which explores the role of professional athletes in politics, and Cristina Henrquezs Lunch, which invites students to her familys table to remember bygone traditions.

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Add value to your text by packaging one of the following resources with 50 Essays. To learn more about package options for any of the following products, contact your Bedford/St. Martins sales representative or visit macmillanlearning.com.

LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers offers instruction tailored to individual students unique needs and features several innovative digital tools.

• Reading comprehension quizzes for every selection in 50 Essays.

• Pre-built units that support a learning arc. Each unit includes a pre-test, multimedia instruction and assessment, help for multilingual writers, and a post-test that assesses what students have learned about critical reading, the writing process, using sources, grammar, style, and mechanics.