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The Prentice Hall Reader
Fifth Edition
by George Miller
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The Prentice Hall Reader is predicated on two premises: that reading plays a vital role in learning how to write and that writing and reading can best be organized around the traditional division of discourse into a number of structural patterns. Such a division is not the only way that the forms of writing can be classified, but it does have several advantages.
First, practice in these structural patterns encourages students to organize knowledge and to see the ways in which information can be conveyed. How else does the mind know except by classifying, comparing, defining, or seeking cause and effect relationships? Second, the most common use of these patterns occurs in writing done in academic courses. There students are asked to narrate a chain of events, to describe an artistic style, to classify plant forms, to compare two political systems, to tell how a laboratory experiment was performed, to analyze why famine occurs in Africa, to define a philosophical concept, or to argue for or against building a space station. Learning how to structure papers using these patterns is an exercise that has immediate application in students' other academic work. Finally, because the readings use these patterns as structural devices, they offer an excellent way in which to integrate reading into a writing course. Students can see the patterns at work and learn how to use them to become more effective writers and better, more efficient readers.
What Is New in the Fifth Edition
The fifth edition of The Prentice Hall Reader features 58 selections, 19 of which are new, and another 13 papers written by student writers. As in the previous editions, the readings are chosen on the basis of several criteria: how well they demonstrate a particular pattern of organization, appeal to a freshman audience, and promote interesting and appropriate discussion and writing activities.
New to this edition is a case study of Gordon Grice's essay on the black widow spider as it moves from notebook entries through original publication in a literary journal, and finally to a revised version published in Harper's magazine. Students can compare three versions of the essay and see how Grice revised his writing. In an exclusive interview, Grice discusses the writing and revising of the essay.
Also new to the fifth edition is material on finding, using, and documenting electronic sources--e-mail, on-line databases, World Wide Web documents--along with tips on using keyword searches and Web search engines. Three student research papers are now included, each of which uses a wide range of source material including articles taken from electronic databases and the World Wide Web.
The readings in the fifth edition include five essays about e-mail, cyberspace, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. New student examples have been added throughout the text, including three student research papers. Each chapter also includes a brief section on how the traditional patterns are used in writing for courses in other disciplines.
The fifth edition of The Prentice Hall Reader has an extensive World Wide Web site at http://www.prenhall.com/miller which offers additional materials for discussion and writing, classroom support for instructors, bibliographies of interviews with the writers, of other related information sources, and of other essays that might be paired. A chat line allows instructors and students to exchange ideas and writing suggestions.
A new Instructor's Quiz Booklet, containing a content and a vocabulary quiz for each of the selections, is available from your Prentice Hall representative.
Other Distinctive Features of This Text
Prose in Revision
As every writing instructor knows, getting students to revise is never easy. Having finished a paper, most students do not want to see it again, let alone revise it. Furthermore, for many students revising means making word substitutions and correcting grammatical and mechanical errors--changes that instructors regard as proofreading, not revising. To help make the need for revision more vivid and to show how writers revise, The Prentice Hall Reader includes three features:
- 1. Chapter 10: Revising. A complete chapter with a lengthy introduction offers specific advice on how to revise. The chapter also includes advice on revising from William Zinsser and three examples of how professional writers revised their work. A new case study of Gordon Grice's essay on the black widow spider documents the evolution of the essay from notebook entries to its original publication in a small literary journal, and then on to its appearance, revised again, in Harper's magazine.
- 2. The introduction to each chapter of readings include a first draft of a student essay, a comment on the draft's strengths and weaknesses, and a final, revised draft. These essays, realistic examples of student writing, model the student revision process.
- 3. The third writing suggestion after each selection is accompanied by prewriting and rewriting activities. In all, the text provides 170 specific rewriting activities to help students organize ideas and to revise what they have written.
Selections
The fifth edition of The Prentice Hall Reader offers instructors flexibility in choosing readings. No chapter has fewer than five selections and most have six or more. The readings are scaled in terms of length and sophistication. The selections in each chapter begin with a student essay and the selections from professional writers are arranged so that they increase in length and in difficulty and sophistication.
Writing Suggestions
Each reading is followed by four writing suggestions: the first is a journal writing suggestion; the second calls for a paragraph-length response; the third, an essay; and the fourth, an essay involving research. Each of the suggestions is related to the content of the reading and each calls for a response in the particular pattern or mode being studied. The material in the Annotated Instructor's Edition includes a fifth writing suggestion for each reading, bringing the total number of writing suggestions in the fourth edition to nearly 300. Even more writing suggestions can be found at The Prentice Hall Reader Web site at http://www.prenhall.com/miller.
Introductions
The introduction to each chapter offers clear and succinct advice to the student on how to write that particular type of paragraph or essay. The introductions anticipate questions, provide answers, and end with a checklist, titled "Some Things to Remember," to remind students of the major concerns they should have when writing.
How to Read an Essay
The first introductory section offers advice on how to read an essay, following prereading, reading and rereading models. A sample analysis of an essay by Lewis Thomas shows how to use this reading model to prepare an essay for class.
How to Write an Essay
The following section, "How to Write an Essay," offers an overview of every stage of the writing process, starting with advice on how to define a subject, purpose, and audience and an explanation of a variety of prewriting techniques. The section also shows students how to write a thesis statement, how to decide where to place that statement in an essay, and how to approach the problems of revising an essay. Finally it contains a student essay as well as two drafts of the student's two opening paragraphs.
Annotated Instructor's Edition
An annotated edition of The Prentice Hall Reader is available to instructors. Each of the selections in the text is annotated with:
A Teaching Strategy that suggests ways in which to teach the reading and to keep attention focused on how the selection works as a piece of writing
A suggested link to other writing and organizational strategies found in the reading
Appropriate background information that explains allusions or historical contexts
Specific class and collaborative learning activities that can be used with the reading
A critical reading activity
Links to Writing that suggest how to use the reader to teach specific grammatical, mechanical, and rhetorical issues in writing. These "links" provide a bridge between a handbook and The Prentice Hall Reader.
Possible responses to all of the discussion questions included within the text
Tips on "related readings" that suggest how to pair essays in the reader
An additional writing suggestion
Instructor's Quiz Booklet
A separate Instructor's Quiz Booklet for The Prentice Hall Reader is available from your Prentice Hall representative. The booklet contains two quizzes for each selection in the reader--one on content and the other on vocabulary. Each quiz has five multiple-choice questions. The quizzes are intended to be administered and graded quickly. They provide the instructor with a brief and efficient means of testing the student's ability to extract significant ideas from the readings and of demonstrating his or her understanding of certain vocabulary words as they are used in the essays. Keys to both content and vocabulary quizzes are included at the back of the Quiz Booklet.
Teaching Writing with "The Prentice Hall Reader"
A separate manual on planning the writing and the reading in a composition course is available from your Prentice Hall representative. Primarily addressed to the new graduate teaching assistant or the adjunct instructor, the manual includes sections on teaching the writing process, including how to use prewriting activities, to conference, to design and implement collaborative learning activities, and to grade. In addition, it provides advice on how to plan a class discussion of a reading and how to avoid pointless discussions. An appendix contains an index to all of the activities and questions in The Prentice Hall Reader that involve grammatical, mechanical, sentence- or paragraph-level subjects, three additional sample syllabi, and a variety of sample course materials including self-assessment sheets, peer editing worksheets, and directions for small group activities.
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