Contents of Topics

Preface

INTRODUCTION

Reading to Write

Reading to Remember and to Criticize

Reading Like Writers

Reading to Revise

The Revising Process

Revising for Unity, Coherence, and Emphasis

Reading and Revising: One Example

George Orwell

Shooting an Elephant "And afterward I was very glad the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking like a fool."

Profile

Exercise

First-Person Narration

Indirect Quotation

The Generic The

Conjunctive Openers

Revision Strategies

Student Revisions

Revision 1: Michael Stamps

Revision 2: Roopa Belur

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

ESSAYS

Edward Abbey

Even the Bad Guys Wear White Hats "Our public lands have been overgrazed for a century. The BLM knows it; the Forest Service knows it. The Government Accounting Office knows it. And overgrazing means eventual ruin, just like stripmining or clear cutting or the damming of rivers. Much of the Southwest already looks like...a cowburnt wasteland."

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The Uses of the Personal

Using Fragments

Revision Strategies

Student Revision: Jodi A. Edwards

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Rick Bass

Shortest Route to the Mountains "There is a great deal of satisfaction to be experienced racing past the half-turned fields of cotton and soybeans barefooted in shorts and tee shirt at two-thirty in the afternoon on your vacation, on your way through the Delta, on your way to the mountains..."

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Representation vs. Expression

Using the Second Person

Unconventional Punctuation

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Wendell Berry

The Pleasures of Eating "I mentioned earlier the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure-pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance-is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world."

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The Limits of Humor

Pronouns and Coherence

Writing with Gender

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Carol Bly

A Mongoose Is Missing "In my town, at least, we are still judgmental, rigid, and punitive about bad behavior. We still do the classic American small-town process of slightly isolating anyone who is practicing selfishness at others' expense."

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Writing About Values

Transitions and Digressions

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Frank Conroy

Think About It "The physical body exists in a constant state of tension as it maintains homeostasis, and so too does the active mind embrace the tension of never being certain, never being absolutely sure, never being done, as it engages the world. That is our special fate, our inexpressibly valuable condition."

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Loose vs. Periodic Sentences

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Alan M. Dershowitz

Shouting "Fire!" "Analogies are, by their nature, matters of degree. Some are closer to the core example than others. But any attempt to analogize political ideas in a pamphlet, ugly parody in a magazine, offensive movies in a theater, controversial newspaper articles, or any of the other expressions and actions catalogued above to the very different act of shouting `Fire!' in a crowded theater is either self-deceptive or self-serving."

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Using Paraphrase

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Jared Diamond

What Are Men Good For? "The question `What Are Men Good For?' may sound like a flip one-liner, but it touches a raw nerve in our society. Women are becoming intolerant of men's self-ascribed status and criticizing those men who provide better for themselves than they do for their wives and children."

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Addressing the Reader

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Joan Didion

Marrying Absurd "Perhaps the Las Vegas wedding industry achieved its peak operational efficiency between 9:00 p.m. and midnight of August 26, 1965... One hundred and seventy-one couples were pronounced man and wife in the name of Clark County and the State of Nevada that night, sixty-seven of them by a single justice of the peace, Mr. James A. Brennan."

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Writing with Gaps

Using Details

Using Dialogue Guides

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Annie Dillard

In the Jungle "The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there. We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place."

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Composing Openers

Transitions

Revision Assignment

Writing Assignments

Barbara Ehrenreich

Talking in Couples "Is there any way to teach a grown man, or short of that, a little one, how to converse in a manner that is stimulating, interesting, and satisfying to women? One approach might be to work through the educational system, introducing required mixed-gender courses in English conversation."

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Writing with Humor

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Gretel Ehrlich

A Storm, the Cornfield, and Elk "The quick-blanch of frost stings autumn's rouge into a skin that is tawny. At dawn, mowed hay meadows are the color of pumpkins, and the willows, leafless now, are pink and silver batons conducting inaudible river music."

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Writing with Figurative Language

Exercise

Using Colons and Semicolons

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Paul Gruchow

A Backyard Robin, Ho-Hum "The point, though, is not that we have radically altered our world, which is old news, but that we have homogenized it. A backyard in Worthington, Minnesota, is no longer distinguishable from one in New Haven Connecticut; Great Falls, Montana; Bend, Oregon. We plant the same trees, tend the same grasses, nurture the same flowers, play host to the same birds."

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Using Sources

Parallelism

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Ann Hodgman

No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch "Is a Gaines-burger really like a hamburger? Can you fry it? Does dog food `cheese' taste like real cheese? Does Gravy Train actually make gravy in the dog's bowl, or is that brown product just dissolved crumbs? ... Having spent the better part of a week eating dog food, I'm sorry to say that I now have the answers to these questions."

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Using Dashes

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Jamaica Kincaid

On Seeing England for the First Time "At that moment, I was thinking, who are these people who forced me to think of them all the time, who forced me to think that the world I knew was incomplete, or without substance, or did not measure up because it was not England; that I was incomplete, or without substance, and did not measure up because I was not English?"

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Paragraphing

Exercise

The Passionate Style

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

June Kinoshita

Maya Art for the Record "It was in 1900 that Adela Catherine Breton first rode into the archaeological camp at the great Maya temple city of Chichen Itza. ... Over the next eight years, the Englishwoman time and again braved heat, ticks and foot-dragging bureaucrats to return to Chichen Itza to sketch and paint the stone reliefs that enlivened the limestone walls of the ruins."

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Using Sources

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Lewis H. Lapham

Burnt Offerings "The stories haven't changed much since I first began going to the movies fifty years ago, but what has changed is the purpose to which Hollywood directs the scenes of violence. Instead of advancing the plot, the killing serves as set decorations, meant to be admired for nothing other than itself, as if the sight of a knife being driven into the villain's forehead were comparable to a gilded fire screen or an ornamental vase."

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Criticism and Satire

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Barry Lopez

The Stone Horse "It was laid out on the ground with its head to the east, three times life size. As I took in its outline I felt a growing concentration of all my senses, as though my attentiveness to the pale rose color of the morning sky and other peripheral images had now ceased to be."

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Embedding Information

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Nancy Mairs

Doing It the Hard Way "I think there's an authentic alternative to either denial or masochism in response to a difficult life. You can use your hardships to augment your understanding of and appreciation for yourself and the world you dwell in. Because a difficult life is more complicated than an easy one, it offers opportunities for developing a greater range of response to experience: a true generosity of spirit."

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Sequencing Information

Exercise

Using Quotation Marks

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

John McPhee

In Virgin Forest "In virgin forest, the ground is uneven, dimpled with pits and adjacent mounds. Perfect trees rise, yes, with boles clear to fifty and sixty feet; but imperfect trees are there too--bent twigs, centuries after bending--not to mention the dead standing timber, not to mention four thousand board feet rotting as one trunk among the mayapples and the violets ..."

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Writing for Insiders

Using Quotes

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

N. Scott Momaday

The Way to Rainy Mountain "Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America. Her forebears came down from the high country in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a mountain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters whose language has never been classified in any major group."

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Descriptive and Narrative Verbs

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Jean Nathan

Fancydancer "Until 1992, Alexie had never been east of Missoula, Montana, but now sixty readings have taken him, and his sense of guilt and wonder, all over America. `There were as many opportunities for me to fail as to succeed,' he says. `I know a hundred other stories of people on my reservation who failed. I'm amazed that I've made it, and feel guilty because I've left some people behind.'"

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Exercise

Arrangement and Presentation

Punctuating Titles

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Cynthia Ozick

The Seam of the Snail "I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of a snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leading attar. My mother was too mettlesome to feel the force of a comma. She scorned minutiae. She measured her life according to what poured from the horn of plenty, which was her own seamless, ample, cascading elastic, susceptible, inexact heart."

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Writing with Metaphors

Transitions Between Paragraphs

Exercise

Using Dashes and Parentheses

Revision Assignment

Writing Assignments

David Quammen

The Descent of the Dog "Anyway, from wherever they come, here they are. Sixty million Canis familiaris: as many dogs, now, as we once had bison. That's a very sobering little gauge, in itself, of the degradation of America. Man's best friend, don't you know--at least so we are endlessly told. The dog is man's best woof woof woof. But with friends like that, says I, who needs enemies? Bah, humbug."

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Persuading with Humor

Sentence Variety

Sentence Types

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Leslie Marmon Silko

Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination "The oral narrative, or `story,' became the medium in which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and belief was maintained. Whatever the event or the subject, the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories."

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Exercise

Using Fragments

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Jonathan Swift

A Modest Proposal "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

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Sequencing Information

Structuring Solution Essays

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Amy Tan

Mother Tongue "I am a writer. And by definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of time thinking about the power of language--the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all--all the Englishes I grew up with."

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Writing with Appositives

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Lewis Thomas

The Tucson Zoo "Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our kind of civilization, as affection or friendship or attachment."

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Technical vs. Familiar Language

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Sallie Tisdale

Shoe and Tell? "A few years ago Nike's overseas labor practices were publicized, and the small scandal that followed made it clear that the foreign operations of a number of U.S. shoe companies left a lot to be desired. My Reeboks were made in Korea, and I promised myself that my next pair of athletic shoes would be made in America."

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Presenting Quotations

Direct and Indirect Quotations

Showing and Telling

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Alice Walker

Am I Blue? "...I almost laughed (I felt too sad to cry) to think there are people who do not know that animals suffer. People like me who have forgotten, and daily forget, all that animals have to tell us. `Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson' is essentially it, I think."

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Pace (Slowing Down)

Pace (Speeding Up)

The It Pattern

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

E. B. White

Once More to the Lake "It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness.... The only thing that was wrong now, really, was the sound of the place, and unfamiliar nervous sound of outboard motors. This was the note that jarred, the one thing that would sometimes break the illusion and set the years moving."

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Process Narration

The Specific and Generic The

There Patterns

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

John Edgar Wideman

Father Stories "...death is not exactly the last thing that happens, because you never know what's going to happen next. For better or worse, cursed and blessed by this ignorance, we invent, fill it, are born with the gift, the need, the weight of filling it with our imagings. That are somehow as real as we are. Our mothers and fathers and children. Our stories."

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Coherence

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Virginia Woolf

The Death of the Moth "Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other beings, there was something marvelous as well as pathetic about him."

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Audience

Using One

Exercise

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

Tristram Wyatt

Submarine Beetles "One summer evening, I watched the tide as it flowed gently up the creek like a river in reverse, creeping slowly over the salt-marsh shore in Norfolk, England. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of red. A small, shiny black- and-red beetle had run in and out of its burrow..."

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Narrative Openers

Knowing the Audience

Defining with Appositives

Revision Assignments

Writing Assignments

SHORT STORY

Guy de Maupassant

The Bell "He had known better days, in spite of this misery and infirmity. At the age of fifteen, he had had both legs cut off by a carriage on the highway near Varville. Since that time he had begged, dragging himself along the roads, across farmyards, balanced upon his crutches which brought his shoulders to the height of his ears. His head seemed sunk between two mountains."

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Beginning a Story

Point of View

Revision/Writing Assignments