Intersections A Thematic Reader for Writers

by Isaacs, Emily; Keohane, Catherine

• ISBN13: 9781319004965
• ISBN10: 1319004962
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-10-07
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

Built around compelling readings and topics that students care deeply about, Intersections offers flexible academic reading and writing instruction that supports students without overwhelming them.

 

Intersections offers eight chapters of timely readings—forty-eight in total-- with themes like Sports in American Society, Immigration, and Language and Identity, that keep students interested and spark ideas for their writing. Carefully structured reading and writing questions and discussion prompts before, during, and after the readings guide students as they move from comprehension toward critical thinking and inquiry. These core thematic reading chapters work in tandem with innovative modular Toolkits on Reading and Writing that cover key skills such as note-taking, summarizing, peer review, MLA documentation, grammar, and much more.

Author Biography

 Emily Isaacs (B.A., Colby College; Ph.D., University of Massachusetts/Amherst) has taught composition for thirty years, first in Massachusetts, very briefly at a state penitentiary, and, for the last twenty years, at Montclair State University in New Jersey.  She has taught a wide variety of students at various levels, with a special interest on less-prepared students who are anxious to catch up to their peers. Emily developed the award-winning Writing Program at Montclair State, and served as a campus leader in pedagogical innovations, writing assessment, and individualized learning pedagogies. Emily’s scholarship is in the area of Writing Studies, with publications in College English, Pedagogy, Writing Center Journal, Writing Program Administration, and several edited books. She is the co-author of Public Writing: Student Writing as Public Text, and the author of the forthcoming book, Writing at the Comprehensive State University.  Emily is a steadfast believer in teaching all students the creative, intellectual processes that writers follow to succeed, but also sees the importance of providing explicit instruction in the conventions of academic and disciplinary writing.

Catherine Keohane (B.A., Columbia University; Ph.D., Rutgers University) has taught composition for over twenty years, both at four-year and two-year institutions, working with students at every level. She earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Rutgers University and now teaches at Montclair State University, having also taught at Bergen Community College. With a background in eighteenth-century literature, Catherine now splits her teaching between composition and literature. At Montclair State, she served as Director for Writing Placement and also participated in a review of the basic writing curriculum, helping to restructure the course and co-authoring a custom textbook. She has published articles in ELH, Writing Program Administration, Studies in the Novel, and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and has presented papers at conferences including MLA, CCCC, and ASECS. Her scholarship includes literary studies, writing assessment, outcomes assessment, and teaching difficult texts. Catherine sees the goal of college composition classes at all levels as engaging in the crucial work of developing not only students’ critical reading and writing skills but also their confidence in their ability and right to join in conversation with other writers.

Table of Contents

                                                          Table of Contents

About the Authors
Note to Students
Preface for Instructors
Teaching with LaunchPad Solo for Readers and Writers
Rhetorical Table of Contents

 

Chapter 1: Getting Active: An Approach to Successful College Reading

Introduction: Getting Active
Reading Terms
Reading for College
Moving Beyond Passive Reading
Strategies for Academic Reading: Be Active, Be Critical
After Reading: Preparing to Discuss the Readings in Class
Good Reading Habits
Academic Reading Strategies at a Glance

 

Chapter 2: Breaking It Down: An Approach to College Writing

Introduction: Breaking It Down
Writing Terms
The Shape of an Academic Essay
Clarity and Style
What Is Academic Writing?
Process Writing 101: Writing in College
The Writing Process in Action: An Example
Successful Writers Share Their Work and Receive Feedback on It
Successful Writers Edit for Clarity
Genres: Types of Assignments
Essential Elements of Academic Essays: Focus, Development, Discussion, Organization, and Clarity

 

Chapter 3: Toolkits for Reading and Writing

          What Are Toolkits?

SECTION  1 GETTING THE MOST OUT OF READING
          Toolkit 1.1 Margin Notes
          Toolkit 1.2 Outlining
          Toolkit 1.3 Summarizing
          Toolkit 1.4 Decoding Vocabulary
          Toolkit 1.5 Finding the Main Idea
          Toolkit 1.6 Decoding Genres
          Toolkit 1.7 Decoding Narratives
          Toolkit 1.8 Decoding Reports
          Toolkit 1.9 Decoding Analytical Texts
          Toolkit 1.10 Decoding Arguments
          Toolkit 1.11  Decoding Voices
          Toolkit 1.12 Decoding Visual Texts
          Toolkit 1.13 Evaluating Arguments
          Toolkit 1.14 Overcoming Reader’s Block

SECTION 2  GENERATING WRITING

          Toolkit 2.1 Basic Brainstorming
          Toolkit 2.2 Directed Brainstorming
          Toolkit 2.3 Outlining and Planning
          Toolkit 2.4 Drafting a Thesis
          Toolkit 2.5 Directed Summaries
          Toolkit 2.6 Quote Sandwiches
          Toolkit 2.7 Drafting the Introduction
          Toolkit 2.8 Drafting the Conclusion
          Toolkit 2.9: Comparing and Contrasting Ideas
          Toolkit 2.10 Making Connections between Articles
          Toolkit 2.11 Thinking With and Against Other Writers
          Toolkit 2.12 Discussion and Analysis
          Toolkit 2.13 Overcoming Writer’s Block

SECTION 3 ORGANIZING WRITING

          Toolkit 3.1 Keys to Organization
          Toolkit 3.2 Clustering
          Toolkit 3.3 Scissors and Tape
          Toolkit 3.4 Color-Coding
          Toolkit 3.5 Reverse Outline
          Toolkit 3.6 Purpose Outline
          Toolkit 3.7 Topic Sentences
          Toolkit 3.8 A Checklist for Transitional Expressions
          Toolkit 3.9 Coherence between Paragraphs
          Toolkit 3.10 Organizing Your Comparison and Contrast
          Toolkit 3.11 Paragraph Makeover

SECTION 4 REVISING WRITING

          Toolkit 4.1 Tackling Revision
          Toolkit 4.2 Peer Review Guidelines
          Toolkit 4.3 “Basic Checklist” Peer Review
          Toolkit 4.4 Peer Review for Essay Development  
          Toolkit 4.5 Summary Peer Review
          Toolkit 4.6 Conversational Peer Review
          Toolkit 4.7 Peer Review for Narratives 
          Toolkit 4.8 Peer Review for Clarity
          Toolkit 4.9 Using Feedback to Revise
          Toolkit 4.10 Deep Revision Strategies
          Toolkit 4.11 Revising Your Thesis
          Toolkit 4.12 Strengthening Evidence and Examples
          Toolkit 4.13 Connecting Reasons and Evidence
          Toolkit 4.14 Fixing Common Mistakes in Introductions
          Toolkit 4.15 Fixing Common Mistakes in Conclusions
          Toolkit 4.16 Should You Abandon a Draft?

SECTION 5 FOLLOWING WRITING RULES AND CONVENTIONS

          Toolkit 5.1 Document Design Basics 
          Toolkit 5.2 The Good Enough Title
          Toolkit 5.3 A Better Title
          Toolkit 5.4 Capitalization
          Toolkit 5.5 Punctuation Basics
          Toolkit 5.6 Comma Tips and Tricks
          Toolkit 5.7 The Apostrophe Explained
          Toolkit 5.8 How to Refer to Authors and Texts
          Toolkit 5.9 Using Signal Phrases
          Toolkit 5.10 Quotation Format Guidelines
          Toolkit 5.11 Using Ellipses and Brackets
          Toolkit 5.12 Quotation Integration Checklist
          Toolkit 5.13 Basic MLA Rules 
          Toolkit 5.14 Creating a Personal Editing Checklist
          Toolkit 5.15 Basic Proofreading Checklist

SECTION  6 POLISHING SENTENCES

          Toolkit 6.1 Sentence Variety
          Toolkit 6.2 Coordination and Subordination
          Toolkit 6.3 Fragments
          Toolkit 6.4 Run-ons
          Toolkit 6.5 Subject - Verb Agreement
          Toolkit 6.6 Commonly Misused Words
          Toolkit 6.7 Substituting for “And” 
          Toolkit 6.8 Editing for Wordiness
          Toolkit 6.9 Overused Verbs 
          Toolkit 6.10 Adjective and Adverb Variety
          Toolkit 6.11 Keeping Pronouns Consistent
          Toolkit 6.12 Vague Pronouns
          Toolkit 6.13 Shifts in Point of View
          Toolkit 6.14 Reading Aloud
          Toolkit 6.15 Ten Common Sentence-Level Mistakes

 

Chapter 4: Language and Identity: Are We Made with Words? 

 

Language and Identity
Rafael Campo, “The Way of the Dinosaurs.”

“By learning English, I hoped I would someday forget Spanish completely. In fact, I believed that only by unlearning Spanish could I finally leave Cuba behind and become truly American.”

 

Arthur Chu, “Breaking Out the Broken English.”

“The accent of our parents is the accent of the grimy streets of Chinatown with its mahjong parlors and fried food stalls and counterfeit jewelry, so we work to wipe away all traces of that world from our speech so we can settle comfortably into our roles as respectable middle-class doctors, lawyers, engineers, hundreds of miles from Chinatown.”

 

Tracy López, “Non-Spanish Fluent Latinas: ‘Don’t Judge Us.’”

“For U.S. Latinos, not speaking Spanish is often a source of insecurity or even shame. Lacking Spanish fluency brings with it judgment from other Latinos in the community as well as a loss of opportunity.”

 

Linguistic Profiling 

Patricia Rice,  “Linguistic Profiling: The Sound of Your Voice May Determine if You Get that Apartment or Not.” 

“Many Americans can guess a caller’s ethnic background from their first hello on the telephone. However, the inventor of the term ‘linguistic profiling’ has found in a current study that when a voice sounds African-American or Mexican-American, racial discrimination may follow.”

 

John Russell Rickford,  and Russell John Rickford, “Spoken Soul and Standard English.” 

“The question remains about why Spoken Soul persists despite the negative attitudes toward it, and its speakers, that have been expressed for centuries. The primary answer is its role as a symbol of identity.”

 

Ellen Welty, “Are Your Words Holding You Back?” 

“But the fact is, using self-deprecating words does lead people to think -- and treat you as if -- you’re less capable than you really are.”

 

Chapter 5: Appearance: Who Should Decide What We Look Like?

Troubles with Body Image
Alice Randall, “My Soul to Keep, My Weight to Lose.”

“With one in four Black women over 55 having diabetes, four in five Black women over-weight and obesity in danger of overtaking smoking as the number one cause of preventable cancer death, not taking care of myself and taking care of others first wasn't a lifestyle; it was a death style.”

 

Abigail Saguy, “Why We Diet.”

“Multiple studies have documented weight bias in employment, healthcare, education and public spaces — unequal treatment based on stereotyping fat people as lazy, unmotivated, sloppy and lacking in self-discipline and competence.”

 

Jamie Santa Cruz,  “Body-Image Pressure Increasingly Affects Boys.”

“In the face of the ideals they’re bombarded with, it’s no surprise that adolescent boys, like waves of girls before them, are falling prey to a distorted image of themselves and their physical inadequacies.”

 

Appearance Choices
Kevin Fanning, “One Man Explains Why He Swears by Wearing Spanx.”

“But when I finished getting dressed, my clothes magically fit for the first time ever. I felt transformed into a newer, slightly less blobby version of myself. I felt confident about how I looked, in a way that was more like stepping into a new skin than merely cinching up the old.”

 

Sharon  Haywood, “How Body Modification Ended the War Against My Body”

“Part of my choice to be pierced and tattooed was to define my body—on my terms and mine alone. Not as defined by the media, nor by my partner, nor by the men who violated me.”

 

 Lauren Shields, “My Year of Modesty.”

“It’s not possible, I thought, that women would feel freer dressed modestly, that women would choose to be ashamed of their bodies. But it wasn’t shame, I soon learned. In fact, for many women, it was pride. It was a desire to be considered for things other than what their hairstyle communicated, or whether their butts were shaped right.”

 

Chapter 6: Immigration: America’s Great Story

The Immigrants: A Historical Perspective
John F. Kennedy, “Why They Came.” 

“Every immigrant served to reinforce and strengthen those elements in American society that had attracted him in the first place. The motives of some were commonplace. The motives of others were noble. Taken together they add up to the strengths and weaknesses of America.”

 

Joe DeGuzman, “Targets of Caricature: Irish Immigrants in 19th Century America.” 
“The media, reflecting and perhaps encouraging nativists’ anxiety, published stereotypical caricatures of the Irish. Many artists suggested that the Irish threatened the status quo by portraying them as ape-like beasts with small heads, extended jaws, and upturned noses.”

Isabel Wilkerson, excerpt from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
“Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.”

 

Today’s Immigrant Voices

 

Firoozeh Dumas, “The ‘F Word’.” 

“All of us immigrants knew that moving to America would be fraught with challenges, but none of us thought that our names would be such an obstacle.”

 

Jose Antonio Vargas, "My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant."

“I decided then that I could never give anyone reason to doubt I was an American. I convinced myself that if I worked enough, if I achieved enough, I would be rewarded with citizenship. I felt I could earn it.”

 

Nadia Mustafa,  and Jeff Chu, "Between Two Worlds."

“[The children of immigrants] have updated the old immigrant story and forged a new Asian-American identity, not wholly recognizable in any of their parents' native lands but, in its hybrid nature, vibrantly American.”

 

Chapter 7: Abilities and Disabilities: Are They Linked? 
Beyond Disability: Stories of Ability

Temple Grandin, “Autism and Visual Thought.”

“One of the most profound mysteries of autism has been the remarkable ability of most autistic people to excel at visual spatial skills while performing so poorly at verbal skills. When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures. I had no idea that my thought processes were different.”

 

Brian Eule, “I Was Trapped in My Own Body.”

“The next time you see a disabled person, Henry told the crowd, remind yourself that you use assistive devices at least as often as they do. But that doesn't diminish you as a person. ‘Your disability doesn't make you any less of a person, and neither does mine,’ he said.”

 

Scott Barry Kaufman, “The Creative Gifts of ADHD.”

“By automatically treating ADHD characteristics as a disability—as we so often do in an educational context—we are unnecessarily letting too many competent and creative kids fall through the cracks.”

 

Rethinking Disability
Rosemary Mahoney, “Why Do We Fear the Blind?”

“One of the many misconceptions about the blind is that they have greater hearing, sense of smell, and sense of touch than sighted people. This is not strictly true. Their blindness simply forces them to recognize gifts they always had but had heretofore largely ignored.”

 

Joann Ellison Rodgers, "Cognitive Outlaws."

“Some of the most exciting clues to the nature and nurture of ‘cognitive outlaws’ come from the most successful among them. All report having developed the ‘courage to fail’ because they experienced failure from an early age. They embraced the ‘cognitive quirks’ that made school and sometimes relationships tough, but also made them charming.”

 

Udoka Okafor, “On Living with Depression.” 

“I was finding it harder and harder to cope with everything, and my resolve was wearing very thin. The school was keeping a close, watchful eye on me, and to everyone, I became a spectacle. I was reduced to this ‘thing’ that could explode at any moment.”

 

Chapter 8: Twenty-first- Century Gender: When It Matters and When It Doesn’t
Rethinking Gender Identity
Matt  Duron, “My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It.”

“I’m right here fathering my son. I want to love him, not change him. My son skipping and twirling in a dress isn't a sign that a strong male figure is missing from his life, to me it’s a sign that a strong male figure is fully vested in his life and committed to protecting him and allowing him to grow into the person who he was created to be.”

 

Sarah Showfety, “Field Guide to the Tomboy: High Heels and Pink? No Way.”

“In a society that still often expects men to be tough and rugged and women to be gentle and pretty, embracing their inner tomboy allows females to stand out and be rewarded for activities, rather than appearance or demeanor.”

 

Jennifer Finney Boylan, “A Life in Two Genders.”

“Since then, the awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind--never, although my understanding of what it meant to be a boy, or a girl, was something that changed over time.”

 

Masculinity: What Does It Mean to Be Masculine?
Andrew Romano, “Why We Need to Reimagine Masculinity”

“What’s more masculine: being a strong, silent, unemployed absentee father, or actually fulfilling your half of the bargain as a breadwinner and a dad?”

 

Theodore R. Johnson, III,  “Chivalry, Feminism and  the Black Community.”

“[M]en are simultaneously accused of being lacking in chivalry, while also insulting women with chivalry. Some women also feel pulled between rejecting chivalry out of allegiance with feminism, and embracing it because it makes some men feel more comfortable.”

 

Hailey Yook,  “Chivalry Isn’t Dead, But It Should Be.” 

“So here’s the simple question with no simple answer: Is chivalry sexist?”

 

Chapter 9: More Than Just Sports: What Sports Say About American Society
Do Sports Have Value?
Hilary Beard, “What I Learned From Mo’ne Davis About Girls, Sports and Success.”

“At a time when black girls’ lives and looks are under assault, our daughters deserve no less than to grow up with the same life-affirming benefits that sports have provided our sons and that have propelled Mo’ne into the stratosphere. If her example encourages other black girls and women to get in the game, that could be her greatest accomplishment of all.”

 

Mike Matheny, “Letter to Parents.”

“I know times have changed, but one of the greatest lessons my father taught me was that my coach was always right--even when he was wrong. That principle is a great life lesson about how things really work. Our culture has lost respect for authority, because kids hear their parents complain about teachers and coaches.”

 

Bob Ryan, “I Can Hardly Believe It’s Legal.”

“How do we as a nation reconcile having chosen football as our new national game? Is the trade-off in body carnage worth the type of entertainment the game provides?”

 

Stereotypes and Bias
Casey Gane-McCalla, “Athletic Blacks vs. Smart Whites: Why Sports Stereotypes Are Wrong.”

“Black athletes are usually given credit for their ‘natural athleticism,’ while whites are credited for their ‘hard work,’ ‘discipline’ and ‘knowledge of the game’; as if Black athletes are naturally given the gift of great athleticism, and white people become great athletes through hard work, discipline and intelligence.”

 

Mary Jo Kane, “Sex Sells Sex, Not Women’s Sports.”

“Perhaps such coverage will start a trend whereby those who cover women’s sports will simply turn on the camera and let us see the reality—not the sexualized caricature—of today’s female athletes.”

 

Cyd Zeigler,  “Derrick Gordon Finds his Freedom.” 

“‘It was torture. I was just going around faking my whole life, being someone I’m not. It’s like wearing a mask because everyone else was wearing that mask. Now that I’m taking the mask off, people can finally see who I really am,’ [said Gordon.]”

 

Chapter 10: The Digital Age: Risks and Rewards

 

Connected or Disconnected?
Josh Rose, “How Social Media is Having a Positive Impact on our Culture.”

“We live in this paradox now, where two seemingly conflicting realities exist side-by-side. Social media simultaneously draws us nearer and distances us.”

 

Andrea Shea, “Facebook Envy: How The Social Network Affects Our Self-Esteem”

“Some of us project — and consume — idealized images through Facebook, and researchers have been trying to figure out how all this flawlessness affects us in the real world.”

 

Lindy West, “What Happened When I Confronted Cruelest Troll.”

“Over and over, those of us who work on the internet are told, ‘Don’t feed the trolls. Don’t talk back. It’s what they want.’ But is that true?”

 

Digital Histories and Privacy

 

Jon Ronson, 'Overnight, Everything I Loved Was Gone': The Internet Shaming of Lindsey Stone.”

“By the time she went to bed that night, at 4am, a Fire Lindsey Stone Facebook page had been created. It attracted 12,000 likes. Lindsey read every comment. ‘I really became obsessed with reading everything about myself.’”

 

Julian B. Gewirtz and Adam B. Kern, “Escaping Digital Histories.”

“All this data will remain available forever — both to the big players (tech companies, governments) and to our friends, our sort-of friends and the rest of civil society. This fact is not really new, but our generation will confront the latter on a scale beyond that experienced by previous generations.”

 

Amy Tan, “Personal Errata”. 

“I did some sleuthing the other day to see who exactly is this Amy Tan who looks forever the same as in 1989, has been married to multiple husbands for always the same number of years, and has won all the literary prizes on earth.”

Chapter 11: Words: Sticks and Stones?
Slurs: Who Can Use Them? Should Anyone Use Them?
Shanelle  Matthews, “The B-Word.”

“Ironically, the more commonly a derogatory word is used, the more invisible it becomes. But since it is a word loaded with negative meaning, it is worth investigating what it truly means, where it came from, and why people are so hung up on using it.”

 

Steven A. Holmes, “Why the N-Word Doesn't Go Away.”

“But let's face it, another reason the n-word has a half-life that rivals plutonium is that black people keep it alive; and not just alive in the code-switching way where it is bandied about in private, but shunned in public.”

 

Rose  Bridges, “You Can Call Me ‘Fag’: American Teens Don’t Find Offensive Slurs Offensive.” 

“Of course, even high schools like mine were still full of immature boys who loved shock value and who enjoyed slinging around homophobic words, but in an environment where gay kids were accepted and empowered, we could just laugh in their faces.”

Politically Correct Language Debates
Anna Munsey-Kano, “Why You Shouldn’t Be ‘Politically Correct’”

“Political correctness is a bad term and a bad idea.  We do not live in a ‘politically correct’ world, where race, sex, religion, and gender issues don’t exist, so we cannot live in a world where we don’t mention or talk about them. 

 

Charles Garcia, “Why ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Is a Slur.”

“When you label someone an ‘illegal alien’ or ‘illegal immigrant’ or just plain ‘illegal,’ you are effectively saying the individual, as opposed to the actions the person has taken, is unlawful.”

 

Anat Shenker-Osorio, “Do You Think the Poor Are Lazy?”

“It’s no accident that we routinely refer to the wealthiest as the ‘top’ and the rest as the ‘bottom. In English, good is up and bad is down. That’s why we say, ‘things are looking up’ and ‘she’s down in the dumps.’ No wonder we pull ourselves up (not forward or along) by our bootstraps. Calling certain folks upper class implies they are worth more not just materially but also morally.”

 

Appendix: Sample Student Papers
Index