50 Essays: A Portable Anthology - Samuel Cohen 2017
Preface for instructors
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 Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” E. B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” and Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read,” accompanied by fresh, recent selections such as Colson Whitehead’s “The Loser Edit” and Lydia Millet’s “Victor’s 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 essay’s 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 writer’s 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.
New to this edition
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 Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” and Colson Whitehead’s “The Loser Edit.”
· Essays on contemporary topics that invite students to confront timely issues, including concern over police brutality in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Paranoid Style of American Policing” and the damage to society caused by the “Love What You Do” mantra in Miya Tokumitsu’s “In the Name of Love.”
· Essays that critically examine popular culture to make students aware of the arguments going on around them, including Dave Zirin’s “Pre-Game,” which explores the role of professional athletes in politics, and Cristina Henríquez’s “Lunch,” which invites students to her family’s table to remember bygone traditions.
Get the most out of your course with 50 essays
Bedford/St. Martin’s offers resources and format choices that help you and your students get even more out of your book and course. To learn more about or to order any of the following products, contact your Macmillan sales representative, e-mail sales support (sales_support@bfwpub.com), or visit our online catalog at macmillanlearning.com.
Choose from Alternative Formats of 50 Essays
Bedford/St. Martin’s offers a range of affordable formats, allowing students to choose the one that works best for them. For details, visit macmillanlearning.com.
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Select Value Packages
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. Martin’s 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.
· Video introductions offer overviews of many unit topics and illustrate the concepts at hand.
· Adaptive quizzing for targeted learning. Most units include LearningCurve, game-like quizzing that focuses on the areas in which each student needs the most help.
· The ability to monitor student progress. Instructors can use the gradebook to see which students are on track and which need additional help.
Order ISBN 978-1-319-10219-7 to package LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers with 50 Essays or visit macmillanlearning.com/catalog/readwrite for more information.
Writer’s Help 2.0 is a powerful online writing resource that helps students find answers whether they are searching for writing advice on their own or as part of an assignment.
· Reading Comprehension Quizzes for 50 Essays. Get reading comprehension quizzes for each selection in 50 Essays, already included in the Writer’s Help 2.0 platform.
· Smart search. Built on research with more than 1,600 student writers, the smart search in Writer’s Help 2.0 provides reliable results even when students use novice terms such as flow and unstuck.
· Trusted content from our best-selling handbooks. Choose Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version or Writer’s Help 2.0, Lunsford Version and ensure that students have clear advice and examples for all of their writing questions.
· Adaptive exercises that engage students. Writer’s Help 2.0 includes LearningCurve, game-like online quizzing that adapts to what students already know and helps them focus on what they need to learn.
Student access is packaged with 50 Essays, Fifth Edition, at a significant discount. Order ISBN 978-1-319-10218-0 for Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version or ISBN 978-1-319-10208-1 for Writer’s Help 2.0, Lunsford Version to ensure your students have easy access to online writing support. Students who rent a book or buy a used book can purchase access to Writer’s Help 2.0 at macmillanlearning.com/writershelp2.
Instructors may request free access by registering as an instructor at macmillanhighered.com/writershelp2.
For technical support, visit macmillanlearning.com/getsupport.
Portfolio Keeping, Third Edition, by Nedra Reynolds and Elizabeth Davis, provides all the information students need to use the portfolio method successfully in a writing course. Portfolio Teaching, a companion guide for instructors, provides the practical information instructors and writing program administrators need to use the portfolio method successfully in a writing course. To order Portfolio Keeping packaged with this text, contact your sales representative for a package ISBN.
Instructor Resources
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You have a lot to do in your course. Bedford/St. Martin’s wants to make it easy for you to find the support you need — and to get it quickly.
Resources for 50 Essays is available as a PDF that can be downloaded from the Bedford/St. Martin’s online catalog at the URL above. In addition to chapter overviews and teaching tips, the instructor’s manual includes sample syllabi, answers to questions that appear within the book, and suggested classroom activities.
Join Our Community! The Macmillan English Community is now Bedford/St. Martin’s home for professional resources, featuring Bedford Bits and LitBits, our popular blog sites that offer new ideas for the composition classroom and composition teachers. Connect and converse with a growing team of Bedford authors and top scholars who blog on Bits: 50 Essays author Samuel Cohen, Andrea Lunsford, Nancy Sommers, Steve Bernhardt, Traci Gardner, Barclay Barrios, Jack Solomon, Susan Bernstein, Elizabeth Wardle, Doug Downs, Liz Losh, Jonathan Alexander, and Donna Winchell.
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