To Teacher and Student
The readings in this book have been selected to help the college composition student read, think, and write better. The book is not an anthology of literary masterpieces; it is a collection of good—often superlative—writing intended to serve the specific needs of a college composition course. The materials in the book are of two kinds: models which can be more or less directly imitated, and selections which give practice in college-level reading and simultaneously offer significant facts and ideas. Many of the pieces in the book serve both these functions. The text of every selection has been carefully checked; the only adaptation made is the use of double quotation marks for single in two selections by English writers.
The 96 selections have a wide range of interest and illustrate many techniques, styles, and purposes. Persons of widely different backgrounds present their experiences and their thoughts—from the farm boy to the Supreme Court Justice, from the woman educator to the satirist of designing women, from the naive cub pilot to the statesman-philosopher. All sizable sections of the United States are represented. With a few exceptions, the idiom is of our time; the eighteenth and nineteenth century selections are included for the exceptional importance of their content and their contrast with today's way of saying things. The range in style is from the plain and simple, well within the student's powers, to the formal and highly sophisticated. The range in subject matter makes possible an appeal to the student of almost any background and intellectual inclination. The unusual number and variety of personal-experience selections should provide especially useful models for the young writer; they give him an opportunity to begin where he easily can—with what he has seen and experienced. The essays on education and on aspects of the American past and present (in Sections 2 and 4) are intended as a balanced and vigorous introduction to mature democratic values. . (...)