W. W. Norton College Books : English : Progressions

1 SHORT PROSE AND THE MINI-ESSAY
Jan Wiener, The Last Game
Michelle Genz, Getting Pucked
In Focus: Subject and Theme
Leonard Pitts Jr., Too Many Youths Turn Life’s "Speed Bumps" into Unscalable Peaks
In Focus: Thesis
Ana Veciana-Suarez, For Women Only
Robb Walsh, Phantom Church of Cluny
In Focus: Purpose
Marcus Bleecker, My Father’s Black Pride
In Focus: Personal and Academic Writing
Robert Fulghum, from All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
In Focus: Point of View
Carl Sandburg, A Fence and Onion Days
Molly Ivins, Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of Guns
In Focus: Speaking Your Mind
Rafe Martin, Zen Failure
In Focus: Speaking from the Center
Maya Angelou, from The Heart of a Woman
Five Very Short Sketches—Watching TV
In Focus: Brief Narratives
2 CLARITY, ECONOMY, AND STYLE
Andrea Lee, Back to School
In Focus: Defining from Context
Donella H. Meadows, Lines in the Mind, Not in the World
In Focus: Denotation and Connotation
Robert Frost, Mending Wall
Abraham Lincoln, Address at the Dedication of Gettysburg Cemetery as a War Memorial
In Focus: Diction
Aurora Levins Morales, Kitchens
In Focus: Revision
Anatole Broyard, from Intoxicated by My Illness
In Focus: Journals
William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Award Speech
In Focus: Audience
Langston Hughes, The Animals Must Wonder
In Focus: Tone
David James Duncan, A Streetlamp in the Netherlands
William Bryant Logan, Clyde’s Pick-Up
In Focus: Descriptive Detail
Barry Lopez, from The Log Jam
William Maxwell, What He Was Like
Roger L. Welsch, Send in the Clown
In Focus: The Writer’s Stance
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Creatures on My Mind
Abigail Zuger, The Pain Game
3 ORGANIZING PATTERNS
David Quammen, The Face of a Spider
In Focus: Vision and Structure
Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux, Time to Reflect, Time to Feel
In Focus: A Simple, Basic Pattern for the Short Essay
Meg Laughlin, The Test
John Allen Paulos, More Dismal Math Scores for U.S. Students
In Focus: Formal Outlines
Richard Selzer, from Raising the Dead
In Focus: Narration
Ann H. Zwinger, from The Lake Rock
In Focus: Description
Harold Klawans, The Mind of a Neurologist
In Focus: Exposition
John Ruskin, from Fors Clavigera
In Focus: Classification
bell hooks, Representing the Poor
In Focus: Argument
Jenny Lyn Bader, Larger than Life
In Focus: Definition
Mohammad Yunus, Grameen Bank
In Focus: Process
Andrei Codrescu, Pizza Woes
In Focus: Comparison/Contrast
Esmeralda Santiago, from The American Invasion of Mac™n
Robert D. Richardson Jr., Prologue to Emerson: The Mind on Fire
In Focus: Cause and Effect
Stephen King, Why We Crave Horror Movies
Melvin Konner, Why the Reckless Survive
In Focus: Coherence
4 CRITICAL THOUGHT
David Ehrenfeld, Adaptation
In Focus: Critical Analysis
Umberto Eco, How to Speak of Animals
In Focus: Pause and Consider
Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority
Jeremy Iggers, Innocence Lost: Our Complicated Relationship with Food
In Focus: Identifying and Defining the Problem
Harry Stein, Ah, Sweet Vengeance!
In Focus: Concrete Details and Abstract Thought
David C. Anderson, The Crime Funnel
In Focus: Statistical Evidence
Gina Kolata, Should Children Be Told If Genes Predict Illness?
In Focus: Citing Authorities
Anna Quindlen, The Great White Myth
In Focus: Emotional Appeal
Michael Nelson, Politics as a Vital, and Sometimes Noble, Human Activity
In Focus: Cause and Effect in a Persuasive Essay
Marty Klein, Erotophobia: The Cruelest Abuse of All
Otetiani, "Friend and Brother . . ."
In Focus: Classical Argument
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
In Focus: Satire
Barbara Ehrenreich, Kiss Me, I’m Gay
In Focus: Inductive and Deductive Reasoning
Pattiann Rogers, Animals and People: "The Human Heart in Conflict with Itself"
5 FROM EXPERIENCE TO ISSUES
Richard Wolkomir, Making Up for Lost Time: The Rewards of Reading at Last
In Focus: The Reader in the Process
Barbara Kingsolver, Stone Soup
In Focus: How to Measure Your Reading Speed
George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
In Focus: From the Self to Society
Leonard Kriegel, Claiming the Self: The Cripple as American Man
In Focus: The Virtual World of Literature
E. B. White, Once More to the Lake
In Focus: The Appeal to the Senses
Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Looking-Glass Shame
In Focus: Opening with a Quotation
James Baldwin, from Notes of a Native Son
In Focus: Opening with an Anecdote
Kathleen Norris, Where I Am
In Focus: A Sense of Place
6 TEXTUAL CHALLENGES
Jan Hoffman, Judge Hayden’s Family Values
In Focus: Active Reading
Barbara Tuchman, An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government
Dennis Alan Mann, Beams of Light: Looking at Architecture
In Focus: The Research Paper
Jonathan Marks, Black White Other
In Focus: Texture
Dylan Thomas, The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
Stephen Hawking, Is Everything Determined?
In Focus: Science and Philosophy
Jamaica Kincaid, from A Small Place
In Focus: Irony
Mair Zamir, Secrets of the Heart
In Focus: A Scientist Writes
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Reductio Expansioque ad Absurdum
7 ELOQUENCE AND EXPERTISE
Sven Birkerts, From the Window of a Train
In Focus: The Responsive Reader
Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse
Cynthia Ozick, Of Christian Heroism
In Focus: Literary Language
Henry David Thoreau, from Walden—Conclusion
In Focus: Allusion
Richard Rodriguez, Mixed Blood: Columbus’s Legacy. A World Made Mestizo
In Focus: Modernist Nonfiction
Henry Louis Gates Jr., A Dangerous Literacy: The Legacy of Frederick Douglass

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W. W. Norton & Company : College Books

Progressions - Readings for Writers

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