50 Essays: High School Edition by Samuel Cohen - Third Edition, 2011 from Macmillan Student Store

50 Essays: High School Edition

A Portable AnthologyThird Edition ©2011 Samuel Cohen

PACKAGE THIS TITLE WITH OUR 2016 MLA SUPPLEMENT, Documenting Sources in MLA Style (package ISBN-13: 9781319084943). Get the most recent updates on MLA cita...

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50 Essays: High School Edition by Samuel Cohen - Third Edition, 2011 from Macmillan Student Store

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PACKAGE THIS TITLE WITH OUR 2016 MLA SUPPLEMENT, Documenting Sources in MLA Style (package ISBN-13: 9781319084943). Get the most recent updates on MLA citation in a convenient, 40-page resource based on The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition, with plenty of models. Browse our catalog or contact your representative for a full listing of updated titles and packages, or to request a custom ISBN.

50 Essays: A Portable Anthology is the best-selling value-priced reader in the country because its virtues don't stop at the price. Its carefully chosen selections include enough classic essays to reassure instructors, and enough high-interest and high-quality contemporary readings to keep things lively and relevant for students. The editorial apparatus is more extensive than in competing value readers, but still is flexible and unobtrusive enough to support a variety of approaches to teaching composition. In its third edition, 50 Essays continues to offer selections that instructors enjoy teaching, at a price students won't resist, but with more editorial emphasis than before on critical thinking and academic writing skills.
 
Download a sample of Teaching Nonfiction in AP English: A Guide for 50 Essays by Renee H. Shea and Lawrence Scanlon.

Features

Affordable and portable. With a superb selection of readings and at an amazingly low price, 50 Essays is less than half the cost and two-thirds the length of most other readers.
 
A highly teachable selection of classic and contemporary writing. 50 Essays offers excellent models of good writing with selections proven to be effective in the classroom. Classic selections by authors such Frederick Douglass, Plato, and Virginia Woolf expose students to time-tested writing. Contemporary, culturally diverse writers, such as Sherman Alexie, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Amy Tan introduce alternative perspectives and voices.
 
A flexible collection that can be adapted to suit a variety of classroom needs. The alphabetical-by-author arrangement of the readings is supplemented by five alternative tables of contents that organize the selections by theme, rhetorical mode, writing purpose, chronological order, and into teaching pairs and clusters.
 
Practical apparatus that meets the needs of writing instructors. The editorial material moves students from critical reading to thoughtful writing and revising. 
  • An introduction for students discusses the relationship between critical thinking, reading, and writing.
  • Headnotes precede each reading, providing biographical and contextual background. 
  • Four kinds of questions follow each selection to help students understand, analyze, and connect to what they read. 
  • A glossary of writing terms provides definitions of important rhetorical concepts, including examples drawn from essays in the anthology. 

New to This Edition

16 new teachable and engaging selections include:
  • New argument essays that model strategies of persuasive writing, including Verlyn Klinkenborg's “Our Vanishing Night,” Bill McKibben's “Curbing Nature's Paparazzi,” and Alice Walker's “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.”
  • New selections on contemporary topics that engage students such as media and popular culture (including Steven Johnson's “Games” and Eric Schlosser's “Kid Kustomers”) and nature and the environment (including Rachel Carson's “The Obligation to Endure” and Michael Pollan's “What's Eating America.”)
A new student paper models academic writing. The paper is annotated to demonstrate how the student works with and synthesizes multiple sources and develops and supports a thesis.
 
More help for students for making critical connections. Each selection is followed by questions that make connections to other selections, and an expanded alternative table of contents highlights essay pairs and trios that will stimulate comparative critical thinking and writing.

Digital Options

Table of Contents

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

Samuel Cohen

Samuel Cohen (PhD, City University of New York) is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, co-editor (with James Peacock) of The Clash Takes on the World: Transnational Perspectives on The Only Band that Matters, co-editor (with Lee Konstantinou) of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Series Editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture, and has published in such journals as Novel, Clio, Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Basic Writing, and Dialogue: A Journal for Writing Specialists. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is author of 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology and coauthor of Literature: The Human Experience.