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Connections, Contexts, and Possibilities values thinking, reading, and writing as the prime activities of composition. This rhetoric and thematic reader centers on the purposes for writing, giving practical advice on paragraph and essay formation as it covers styles, types, and modes. The text teaches grammar in the context of the reading selections, empowering the student by helping them understand their options and choices.
List of contents
I. ADVICE ON WRITING.
1. Paragraphs-What Makes Them Successful?
2. Successful Essays-Classic and Organic Essay Structures.
3. Successful Essays-Major Kinds of Essays.
4. Successful Essays-The Rhetorical Modes.
II. READINGS FOR WRITING.
5. Place-Where Do We Call Home?
The Swing, the Snow, the Skull of a Hare, Robert Wrigley. Landscape and Narrative, Barry Holstun Lopez. The Ship Ahoy, Ursula K. Le Guin. A Place with Promise, Maggie Anderson. Nett Lake, Minnesota, Roberta Hill Whiteman.
6. Work-What Labors Occupy Us?
UMWA Convention Speech, 1902, Mother Jones. Complexion and Labor, Richard Rodriguez. They Call Me Mummy, Sheila Ballantyne. Still Lives in Detroit, #1, #2, and #3, Jim Daniels.
7. Reading/Seeing-What Does This Mean ?
How Should One Read a Book?, Virginia Woolf. Perplexing Lessons. Continued Perplexities, Mark Twain. Cathedral, Raymond Carver. Birches, Robert Frost. Ballad of a Hundred Worries, Tu Fu.
8. Teaching/Learning-What's Gained or Lost in This Process?
The Great-Teacher Myth, Robert B. Heilman. Blackboard Immortality, David A. Fryxell. Wasps, Robley Wilson, Jr. The Amateur, Lola Haskins. Persimmons, Li-Young Lee.
9. Science-What and How Do We Discover?
The Olive in the Martini. The Thermodynamics of Pizza, Harold J. Morowitz. The Music of This Sphere, Lewis Thomas. The Manned Missiles, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. August: A Lunar Eclipse, Allison Funk. Chemistry, Al Young.
10. Politics-What and How Do We Control?
Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell. Fifth Avenue Uptown: A Letter from Harlem, James Baldwin. My Man Bovanne, Toni Cade Bambara. If on Account of the Political Situation, W.H. Auden.
Summary
For Developmental and Freshman Composition courses.
Part rhetoric and part reader, the text is filled with practical guidelines designed to help students develop and intensify their thinking, reading, and writing abilities. Part I focuses on the issues of the writer's purpose. Part II addresses the technical matters of grammar and usage as they exist in the context of an accessible set of essays, stories and poems about themes relevant to students' lives.
