The Essay Connection

by Unknown

• ISBN13: 9780618039654
• ISBN10: 0618039651
• Edition: 6th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-03-30
• Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing

Table of Contents

Topical Table of Contents	xix
Preface	xxix
Acknowledgments	xxxv
Part I On Writing	1	(158)
Writers in Process---Laughing, Speaking, and Reading	1	(39)
Laughing in English	6	(11)
Cathy N. Davidson
``[My Japanese students were] doing the funny American laugh . . . Santa Claus laughter, [while] I continued to laugh Japanese-style, which made them laugh even louder, bouncier. We were off and running, laughing in each other's languages.''
Mother Tongue	17	(8)
Amy Tan
``I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language-the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual 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.''
Parables from Danny Weinstein's Magic Book	25	(9)
Nancy Willard
``This soup by any other name would taste as good; said the diamond. 'Take me out. Do you want your husband to break a tooth?' Moral: The line you love the best is the hardest to cut.''
In Love with Books	34	(6)
Eudora Welty
``I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to.''
The Essay, a Vision: Definition and Reasons for Writing	40	(21)
The Essayist and the Essay	44	(3)
E. B. White
``The essayist . . . Can . . . be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter-philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast.''
Leap Day, the Baby-sitter, Dream, Walking	47	(6)
Louise Erdrich
``As our baby grows more into her own life, so I recover mine, but it is an ambiguous blessing. With one hand I drag the pen across the page and with the other, hand, I cannot let go of hers.''
Why I Write: Making No Become Yes	53	(8)
Elie Wiesel
``For the survivor, writing is not a profession, but an occupation, a duty. Camus calls it 'an honor' . . . Not to transmit an experience is to betray it . . . [I write] to help the dead vanquish death.''
Getting Started	61	(60)
Hearing Voices	67	(5)
Linda Hogan
``As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive.''
Polaroids	72	(5)
Anne Lamott
``Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't-in fact, you're not supposed to-know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.''
A List of Nothing in Particular	77	(5)
William Least Heat-Moon
``To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.''
Building and Writing	82	(6)
Arthur Miller
``I Was looking for . . . a spot for a little shack I wanted to build, where I could block out the world and bring into focus what was still stuck in the corners of my eyes. . . . it had to be my own hands that gave it form . . . with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself.''
Writers' Notebooks	88	(1)
Aboard a Mississippi River Steamboat	89	(8)
Mark Twain
``The river is so thoroughly changed that I can't bring it back to mind even when the changes have been pointed out to me. . . . Yet as unfamiliar as all the aspects have been to-day I have felt as much at home . . . as if I had never been out of the pilot house.''
from The Diary of a Young Girl	97	(7)
Anne Frank
``I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me! (April 5, 1944)
Margot's Diary	104	(5)
S. L. Wisenberg
``One photo we glance past. Because she is unknown. We don't care what she looks like. . . . Not the real one. She is the sister of. The shadow. The first child who made way for the second, the important one. Who is more alive.''
Selections from Student Writers' Notebooks	109	(12)
``I read something in some book from some new author in some bookshop somewhere to the effect that writer's block is 'reading old fat novels instead of making new skinny ones.' My secret is out.''
Writing: Re-Vision and Revision	121	(38)
The Maker's Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts	126	(11)
Donald M. Murray
``When students complete a first draft, they consider the job of writing done-and their teachers too often agree. When professional writers complete the first draft, they usually feel they are at the start of the writing process. When a draft is completed, the job of writing can begin.''
The Draft: My Story/My Story: The Holes	137	(4)
Garry Trudeau
``And while I did indeed feel that to fake an injury [to avoid the draft] was wrong, it should be added I was also pretty sure I couldn't pull it off.''
On Discovery	141	(3)
Maxine Hong Kingston
This Parable provides a startling and painful definition of what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated Chinese culture.
Guidelines for Collaborating in Groups	144	(4)
John Trimbur
``People have different styles of interacting in groups. . . . So successful groups learn to incorporate the strengths of all these styles, making sure that even the most reticent members participate.''
Writer's Notebook Entries: The Evolution of ``Mama's Smoke''	148	(11)
Mary Ruffin
The nine preliminary versions of this essay, freewritings, poems, and prose drafts have resulted in an elegant, poetic essay. ``My mother dead for a decade,'' says Ruffin, ``speaks in fragments, interrupting in the middle of my own sentences.''
Part II Determining Ideas in a Sequence	159	(152)
Narration	159	(44)
Resurrection	164	(7)
Frederick Douglass
``You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.''
Once More to the Lake	171	(8)
E. B. White
``It is strange how much you can remember about places . . . once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead back.''
Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood	179	(7)
Judith Ortiz Cofer
``[As a child I listened to] cuentos, the morality and cautionary tales told by the women in our family for generations: stories that became a part of my subconscious as I grew up in two worlds, the tropical island and the cold city. . . .''
The Inheritance of Tools	186	(10)
Scott Russell Sanders
``A house will stand, a table will bear weight, the sides of a box will hold together, only if the joints are square and the members upright. When the bubble is lined up between two marks etched in the glass tube of a level, you have aligned yourself with the forces that hold the universe together. . . . I took pains over the wall I was building the day my father died.''
Learning to Drive	196	(7)
Ann Upperco Dolman
``Greater love hath no man for his children than to teach them how to drive,'' asserts the student author of this essay about her experiences as a novice driver.
Process Analysis	203	(55)
Those Crazy Ideas	208	(13)
Isaac Asimov
To create, invent, dream up or stumble over ``a new and revolutionary scientific principle,'' such as the theory of natural selection, requires a felicitous combination of a broad education, intelligence, intuition, courage-and luck.
The Route to Normal Science	221	(12)
Thomas S. Kuhn
``[Paradigms] provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research. . . . The study of paradigms . . . is what mainly prepares the student for membership in the particular scientific community with which he will later practice.''
Inside the Engine	233	(7)
Tom
``There aren't too many things that will go wrong, because [car] engines are made so well. . . . Aside from doing stupid things like running out of oil or failing to heed the warning lights or overfilling the thing, you shouldn't worry.''
What Is It We Really Harvestin' Here?	240	(9)
Ntozake Shange
``We got a sayin', 'The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,' which is usually meant as a compliment. To my mind, it also refers to the delectable treats we as a people harvested for our owners and for our own selves all these many years, slave or free.''
The Turning Point	249	(4)
Craig Swanson
``Dad . . . cups his hands around the belly of the pot. Slowly, as the pot spins around, he sqeezes his hands together, causing it to bevel slightly. . . . It is a rare treat to watch Dad do something that he enjoys so much.''
It's the Only Video Game My Mom Lets Me Chew	253	(5)
Craig Swanson
``All video players develop their own ways of playing the games. Inexperienced players handle the controls spasmodically and nervously. . . . A more experienced video player rarely shows emotion. A casual stance, a plop of the coin, a flip of an eyebrow, and he's ready.''
Cause and Effect	258	(53)
``I Just Wanna Be Average''	263	(10)
Mike Rose
``Students will float to the mark you set. . . . The vocational track . . . is most often a place for those who are just not making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected.''
from The School Days of an Indian Girl	273	(10)
Zitkala-Sa
``I was . . . neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deplorable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East [four years in a boarding school run by whites].''
The Human Cost of an Illiterate Society	283	(11)
Jonathan Kozol
``So long as 60 million [illiterate] people are denied significant participation, the government is neither of, nor for, nor by, the people. It is a government, at best, of those two thirds whose wealth, skin color, or parental privilege allows them opportunity to profit from the provocation and instruction of the written word.''
A Nation of Welfare Families	294	(7)
Stephanie Coontz
``The myth of family self-reliance is so compelling that our actual national and personal histories often buckle under its emotional weight. . . . [However] few families in American history . . . have been able to rely solely on their own resources. Instead, they have depended on the legislative, judicial, and social-support structures set up by governing authorities. . . .''
Framing My Father	301	(10)
Leslie S. Moore
``The lessons my father taught me were stamped in fear and humiliation. Somehow I survived. Somehow the lessons stuck. Somehow I am grateful for the things I learned.''
Part III Clarifying Ideas	311	(274)
Description	311	(59)
A Drugstore Eden	316	(14)
Cynthia Ozick
``In those successive summers of my mother's garden . . . I remember a perpetual sunlight. . . . No one knew the garden was there. It was utterly hidden. You could not see it, or suspect it, inside the Park View [Pharmacy] . . . it was altogether invisible from any surrounding street. It was a small secluded paradise.''
Marrying Absurd	330	(5)
Joan Didion
``Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification. . . .''
Notes of a Native Speaker	335	(14)
Eric Liu
``I was keenly aware of the unflattering mythologies that attach to Asian Americans: that we are indelibly foreign, exotic, math and science geeks, numbers people rather than people people, followers and not leaders, physically frail but devious and sneaky, unknowable and potentially treacherous. . . . The irony is that is working so duteously to defy stereotype, I became a slave to it.''
Masks	349	(11)
Lucy Grealy
``[On Halloween] I put on a plastic witch mask and went out with Teresa. I walked down the street suddenly bold and free: no one could see my face. I peered through the oval eye slits and did not see one person staring back at me, ready to make fun of my face.''
One Remembers Most What One Loves	360	(10)
Asiyas. Tschannerl
``November [in Beijing] would be full of excitement, with its strong gusts of wind and swirling sandstorms. It was amazing to look at a grain of sand and know that it had come from over two thousand miles away, from the Gobi desert. I remember leaning back against that wind and not being able to fall.''
Division and Classification	370	(51)
The Technology of Medicine	375	(6)
Lewis Thomas
``In fact, there are three quite different levels of technology in medicine, so unlike each other as to seem altogether different undertakings.''
Why Men Don't Last: Self-Destruction as a Way of Life	381	(7)
Natalie Angier
``[Men] are at least twice as likely as women to be alcoholics and three times more likely to be drug addicts. They have an eightfold greater chance than women do of ending up in prison. . . . [But] there is not a single, glib, overarching explanation for [these] sexspecific patterns.''
Pomegranates and English Education	388	(10)
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
``I actively sought corruption to break out of the pomegranate shell of being Chinese and girl.''
None of This Is Fair	398	(7)
Richard Rodriguez
``None of this is fair. You've done some good work, but so have I. I'll bet our records are just about equal. But when we look for jobs this year, it's a different story. You get all of the breaks. . . . You're a Chicano. And I am a Jew. That's the only real difference between us.'''
Red and Black, or One English Major's Beginning	405	(16)
Ning Yu
``In the late 1960s the [Communist] Revolution defined 'intellectual' as 'subversive.' So my father, a university professor . . . was regarded as a 'black' element, an enemy of the people. In 1967, our family was driven out of our university faculty apartment, and I found myself in a ghetto middle school, and undeserving pupil of the red expert Comrade Change.''
Illustration and Example	421	(56)
The Power of Books	425	(11)
Richard Wright
``The impulse to dream . . . surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.''
Like Mexicans	436	(5)
Gary Soto
``The wallpaper was bubbled from rain that had come in from a bad roof. Dust. Dust lay on lamp shades and window sills. These people are just like Mexicans, I thought. Poor people.''
Under the Influence: Paying the Price of My Father's Booze	441	(15)
Scott Russell Sanders
``I am only trying to understand the corrosive mixture of helplessness, responsibility, and shame that I learned to feel as the son of an alcoholic.''
On Being a Cripple	456	(15)
Nancy Mairs
``I am a cripple. . . . Perhaps I want [people] to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple. I swagger''
The Great Campus Goof-Off Machine	471	(6)
Nate Stulman
``Why walk 10 feet down the hall to have a conversation when you can chat on the computer-even if it takes three times as long?''
Definition	477	(54)
Understanding Natural Selection	483	(8)
Charles Darwin
``It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.''
Who Owns Intelligence?	491	(15)
Howard Gardner
``What is intelligence? How ought it to be assessed? And how do our notions of intelligence fit with what we value about human beings?'' By Proposing many intelligences, including emotional intelligence and moral intelligence, ``experts are competing for the 'ownership' of intelligence in the next century.''
I Want a Wife	506	(4)
Judy Brady
``I, too, would like to have a wife. . . . My God, who wouldn't want a wife?''
Black Hair	510	(10)
Gary Soto
``As a kid I had imagined a dark fate: to marry Mexican poor, work Mexican hours, and in the end die a Mexican death, broke and in despair. But this job at Valley Tire Company confirmed that there was something worse than fieldwork, and I was doing it. . . . what I felt heaving tires for eight hours a day was felt by everyone-black, Mexican, redneck.''
Code Blue: Two Definitions	520	(1)
Code Blue: The Process	520	(5)
Jasmine Innerarity
``Code Blue is the alert signal for a patient who has stopped breathing or whose heart has stopped. . . . This process is always associated with what seems like chaos to the outsider but to the health team, it is well organized and well executed.''
Code Blue: The Story	525	(6)
Abraham Verghese
``Code Blue, emergency room! The code team-an intern, a senior resident, two intensive care unit nurses, a respiratory therapist, a pharmacist-thundered down the hallway. Patients in their rooms watching TV sat up in their beds; visitors froze in place in the corridors.''
Comparison and Contrast	531	(54)
Communication Styles	536	(8)
Deborah Tannen
``. . . women who go to single-sex schools do better in later life, and . . . when young women sit next to young men in classrooms, the males talk more.''
Written on the Wind	544	(6)
Stewart Brand
``Behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies of extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files. . . . Buried with [obsolete computers] are whole clans of programming languages, operating systems, storage formats, and countless rotting applications in an infinite variety of mutually incompatible versions. Everything written on them was written on them was written on the wind, leaving not a trace.''
Evolution as Fact and Theory	550	(10)
Stephen Jay Gould
``Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them.''
What's Wrong with Animal Rights?	560	(12)
Vicki Hearne
``Animal rights are built upon a misconceived premise that rights were created to prevent us from unnecessary suffering.''
In Search of Our Past	572	(13)
Jenny Spinner
``Although the darkness surrounding our birth bothered us, my [twin] sister and I never opened our adoption records, even after we turned twenty-one and were old enough to do so.''
Part IV Arguing Directly and Indirectly	585	(174)
Appealing to Reason: Deductive and Inductive Arguments	585	(57)
The Declaration of Independence	591	(5)
Thomas Jefferson
``. . . to secure these rights [Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness], Governments are instituted among Men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . . whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. . . .''
Letter from Birmingham Jail	596	(20)
Martin Luther King, Jr.
``Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.''
The Tyranny of the Majority	616	(8)
Lani Guinier
``To me, fair play means that the rules encourage everyone to play. They should reward those who win, but they must be acceptable to those who lose. The central them of my academic writing is that not all rules lead to elemental fair play.''
The Global Elite	624	(12)
Robert Reich
``The top fifth of working Americans [takes] home more money than the other four-fifths put together. . . . The fortunate fifth is quietly seeding from the rest of the nation.''
The Death of a Farm	636	(6)
Amy Jo Keifer
``My mother . . . once said . . . 'Your father works full time to support the farm. I work full time to support the family.''
Appealing to Emotion and Ethics	642	(43)
The Gettysburg Address	648	(2)
Abraham Lincoln
A classic assertion of the unity of a democratic nation, ``conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.''
A Modest Proposal	650	(10)
Jonathan Swift
``I have been assured . . . that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourshing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled. ...''
The Clan of One-Breasted Women	660	(10)
Terry Tempest Williams
``I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.''
The Sanctuary of School	670	(5)
Lynda Barry
``I was going to sit at my desk, with my crayons and pencils and books and classmates all around me, and for the next six hours I was going to enjoy a thoroughly secure, warm and stable world. It was a world I absolutely relied on.''
Harvest of Gold, Harvest of Shame	675	(10)
Matt Nocton
``When the [tobacco harvester] gets off the bus he will find a pick-up truck parked nearby full of burlap and twine. He must tie this burlap around his waist as a source of protection against the dirt and rocks that he will be dragging himself through for the next eight hours.''
Critical Argument: Biographical, Historical, Political, Literary	685	(34)
The Gettysburg Address	691	(7)
Gilbert Highet
``The Gettysburg Address is a great work of art.''
Four Cinderellas: Political Texts, Political Contexts	698	(1)
The Chinese ``Cinderella''	699	(2)
Tuan Ch'Eng-Shih
The Dust Girl	701	(4)
Ning Yu
The Nurturing Woman Rewarded: A Study of Two Chinese Cinderellas	705	(8)
Ning Yu
``The stepmother and her two daughters are no longer the selfish but forgivable friends of the Perrault version, nor the sadistic 'sibling rivals' of the Grimm version, but Dust Girl's oppressors, exploiters, and class enemies. They have all the characteristics of the parasitic leisure class.''
Cinderella	713	(6)
Anne Sexton
``You always read about it: the plumber with twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That Story.''
Death of a Salesman: Responses to an American Classic	719	(40)
Making Willy Loman	722	(10)
John Lahr
Arthur Miller says of his uncle, ``'A hopelessly distracted Manny was transformed into a man with a purpose: he had been trying to make a gift that would crown all those striving years; all those lies he told, all his imaginings and crazy exagerations, even the almost military discipline he had laid on his boys, were in this instant given form and point. I suddenly understood him with my very blood.''
Arthur Miller's Tragedy of an Ordinary Man	732	(4)
Brooks Atkinson
``In the space of one somber evening in the theatre [Arthur Miller] has caught the life and death of a traveling salesman and told it tenderly with a decent respect for Willy's dignity as a man.''
Attention Must Be Paid, Again	736	(5)
Ben Brantley
``You get the sense that Willy Loman would crush his own skull to destroy the images inside. The most frightening thing of all is that you understand exactly what he's feeling. In the harrowing revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman' . . . you walk right into the mind of its decimated hero, played with majestic, unnerving transparency by Brian Dennehy.''
Willy Loman: Icon of Business Culture	741	(11)
Brenda Murphy
``Willy Loman entered the world's consciousness as the very image of the American traveling salesman, an identity with which the business world was far from comfortable,'' writes Murphy. Business writers would have us believe that ``if only he had had better sales training, or better job counseling, or a laptop computer, he would not have failed.''
Death of a Salesman's Wife	752	(7)
Valerie M. Smith
``While Linda Loman does indeed appear to receive social approval from her family (they sing her praises even while disrespecting her), her financial security is precarious throughout the play (until Willy kills himself to collect on his insurance), her family is anything but loving and happy, and in the end 'there'll be nobody home.'''
Glossary	759	(16)
Text Credits	775	(6)
Index of Authors	781