Purpose and Process A Reader for Writers

by Reid, Stephen P.

• ISBN13: 9780131823976
• ISBN10: 0131823973
• Edition: 5th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-28
• Publisher: Pearson

Summary

This innovative reader focuses on writers' purposes and processes for reading and writing, and on the connectionsbetween,reading and writing. Every chapter integrates purpose, process, and rhetorical strategies for achieving specific writing goals. Sixty-four selections by both professional and student writers illustrate these purposes.The readings address reading and writing purposes and processes, observing, remembering, investigating, explaining, evaluating, problem solving, and arguing.For those interested in improving their reading, writing and research abilities.

Table of Contents

1. Reading: Purposes and Processes.

Honor Society Hypocrisy, Ellen Goodman. How to Mark a Book, Mortimer Adler. Television and Reading, Marie Winn. Learning to Read, Malcolm X. The Library Card, Richard Wright. Confessions of a Bibliophile, Bill Holm.

2. Writing: Purposes and Processes.

My Sister, Kari, Nicolle Mircos. Freewriting, Peter Elbow. Shitty First Drafts, Anne Lamott. The Maker's Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts, Donald M. Murray. Writing Around Rules, Mike Rose. Mother Tongue, Amy Tan.

3. Observing.

West Texas, William Least Heat-Moon. Lenses, Annie Dillard. Soup, The New Yorker. Toys, and Barbies, Roland Barthes and Emily Prager. Life at Close Range, Gretel Ehrlich. “Muller Bros. Moving & Storage,” Stephen Jay Gould. Fetal Pig, Elizabeth Weston.

4. Remembering.

Shame, Dick Gregory. Los Pobres, Richard Rodriguez. freedom From Choice, Brian Courtney. Living in Two Cultures, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. In Death's Throat, Robert Hughes. Metamorphosis, Peggy L. Breland. The Wake-Up Call, Walter Goedeker.

5. Investigating.

Attack of the Killer Cats, Leon Jaroff. Reading Statistical Tea Leave, Karen W. Arenson. Lost in Cyberspace, John Skow. The E-Learning Curve, Glenn C. Altschuler. America's Food Cop, Bob Condor. The Ads and Fads of the Super Bowl, Geralyn Falkowsky. The Beauty Behind Beauty Pageants, Mary White.

6. Explaining.

Conversational Ballgames, Nancy Sakamoto. Lies, Lies, Lies, Paul Gray. How to Find True Love: Or Rather, How It Finds You, Lois Smith Brady. Thirteen Ways to Leave Your Lousy Job, Jon Spayde. Why We Crave Horror Movies, Stephen King. Cat Bathing as a Martial Art, Bud Herron. A Question of Language, Gloria Naylor. Wine Tasting: How to Fool Some of the People All of the Time, Michael J. Jones.

7. Evaluating.

The Roadster Returns, Consumer Reports. Corn-Pone Opinions, Mark Twain. In Defense of Talk Shows, Barbara Ehrenreich. Send in the Clones, Brian D. Johnson. All's Not Well in the Land of “The Lion King,” Margaret Lazarus. For the Death Penalty, Ernest Van Den Haag. The Two Best Letters on Television, Craig Cooley.

8. Problem Solving.

It's Time to Ban Handguns, Lance Morrow. Let's Get Rid of Sports, Katha Pollitt. TV Can Be a Good Parent, Ariel Gore. Cross Talk, Deborah Tannen. “Now, If I Ruled the World…” Anne and Paul Ehrlich, Frederik Pohl, Susan Merrow, and Richard Bangs. A White Woman of Color, Julia Alvarez. The Problem of Dropouts Can Be Solved, Jenny Sharpe.

9. Arguing.

Active and Passive Euthanasia, James Rachels. Death and Justice, Edward I. Koch. The Argument Culture, Deborah Tannen. The Ethics of Endorsing a Product, Mike Royko. Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. A Casebook on School Vouchers, Gary Rosen, Bob Chase, Sandra Feldman, James E. Ryan, Michael Heise and Richard Rothstein. Immigration, Emily Sintek. Battered, Kimberly S. Freeman.

Appendix: Conducting Research and Documenting Sources.
Credits.
Index.

Excerpts

"The writer may write to inform, to explain, to entertain, to persuade," Donald Murray says, "but whatever the purpose there should be, first of all, the satisfaction of the writer's own learning." Learning, discovery, excitement, relevance, ownership: These words describe the writer's initial motives for writing. Without human curiosity and the desire to learn, rhetoric collapses into mere terminology. By giving primacy to writer's purposes and processes for reading and writing,Purpose and Process: A Reader for Writersencourages writers to take control of their reading and writing of texts.Three basic assumptions inform the structure ofPurpose and Process.First, rhetorical readers should be organized by purpose, not by strategy. Purpose and Process follows the sequence of purposes set forth inThe Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers,sixth edition. In both texts, the writer's purpose (to explain, evaluate, argue, or explore a subject for a specific audience in a defined context) is the ultimate guide. Strategies (definition, comparison-contrast, process analysis, classification) are subordinated to the writer's overall purpose. The strategies help writers invent and shape ideas, but they rarely control the writing situation. Writers should be encouraged to choose among strategies to achieve a purpose for a given audience. Just as writers select an appropriate voice or choose a formal or informal style, they should be able to choose rhetorical strategies that are appropriate for the writing situation.Second, rhetorical readers should demonstrate that both writing and reading are active, constructive activities. Most teachers recognize that the process of writing is active and constructive, but too often they either ignore the transactive nature of reading or assume that comprehension is merely a matter of close reading. Writers need to learn how readers actively make meaning from texts even as texts are acting upon them. Writers learning to read actively should begin not with the text but with an understanding of their own experiences, ideas, and attitudes; they need to interact with other readers' interpretations as they read and reread; and they need to see how readers rely on their own experience and on prediction as they construct meaning in texts. As part of their interaction with texts, experienced writers and readers also reconstruct the rhetorical situation. Who is writing for whom? What is the occasion? What is the writer's purpose? Most important, writers and readers need to connect what they learn as active readers to their own writing: What do their readers know or believe? What are their readers' expectations? What strategies encourage readers to read actively?To demonstrate how reading and writing are mutually supportive,Purpose and Processuses prereading journal assignments, reader-response activities, and collaborative annotations of texts as means to achieve active, critical reading and effective writing. It asks students to compare what they know before they read an essay with what they learn during the reading of an essay. It asks students to respond to other readers' interpretations. It asks students to construct rhetorical situations for the texts they read and the texts they write. The traditional reading/writing model invariably asks students to read the essays andthenwrite. The apparatus inPurpose and Processasks students to write and talkbeforeandduringreading in order to make reading (and writing) more active and interactive. Prereading and collaborative response are as crucial to the reading process as prewriting and group activities are to the writing process.A rhetorical reader should provide a diverse range of essays, including mainstream and minority authors, multicultural perspectives, and a range of topics and writing levels.Purpose and Process,fifth edition, retains from earlier editions a sampling