Asterisks after titles identify student writings.
Rhetorical Contents
Preface for the Teacher
Preface for the Student
CHAPTER 1 WRITING, THE “WRITING PROCESS,” AND YOU
Literacy Narratives
Composing Your Own Literacy Narratives
CHAPTER 2 FAMILY AND COMMUNITY
Luke 10:29-37 The Good Samaritan
“But who is my neighbor?”
David Brooks People Like Us
“We don't really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal.”
Tom Rosenberg Changing My Name After Sixty Years
“I want to be remembered by the name I was born with.”
Dana Wehle We kissed the Tomato and Then the Sky
“This seventy-nine year-old woman was a juggler extraordinaire, but a juggler's art is both exhilarating and unsettling to watch.”
Steve Tesich Focusing on Friends
“It now seems to me that I was totally monogamous when it came to male friends.”
Amy Tan Mother Tongue
“Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks.”
Mahwash Shoaib Treasures
“This is what a child's trove of bright and diffused memories is made of-shared words and shared silences.”
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim Two Lives
“Oh Asia, that nets its children in ties of blood so binding that they cut the spirit.”
Lewis (Johnson) Sawaquat For My Indian Daughter
“I didn't have an Indian name. I didn't speak the Indian language.'
John Edgar Wideman The Night I was Nobody
“One minute you're a person, the next moment somebody starts treating you as if you're not.”
Sherman Alexie The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me
“I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.”
Susan G. Madera One Voice*
“That first, and last, semester at Brooklyn College was a dream that turned into a nightmare.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 3 GENDER ISSUES
Chinese Folktale Women
“The simplest thing is to bottle up your wife.”
Greek Legend Apollo and Daphne
“Suddenly, she felt her feet become rooted in the earth.”
Gelareh Asayesh Shrouded in Contradiction
“To wear hijab-Islamic covering-is to invite contradiction. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I value it.”
David Brooks The Power of Marriage
“Men are more likely to want to trade up when a younger trophy wife comes along.”
Paul Theroux The Male Myth
“I have always disliked being a man.”
Gary Soto To Be a Man
“I'm looking the part and living well---the car, the house, and the suits in the closet.”
Jerry Rockwood Life Intrudes
“If we can't train the street fighters to be gentlemen, must we train the gentlemen to be street fighters?”
Dennis Altman Why Are Gay Men So Feared?
“In many societies, the links between men are stronger than the relations that link them to women.”
Anna Quindlen Gay
“At that moment he understood that it would be more soothing to his parents to think he was a heroin addict than that he was a homosexual.”
Jason Barone The Gravity of Mark Beuhrle*
“He has since moved to Cleveland, and while we are now able to get along, it's more of a friendly relationship than that of father and son. His words no longer carry any weight.”
Gillianne N. Duncan Why Do We Hate Our Bodies?*
“Why must the media attack women so much? My answer? The world is run by men and a small number of over achieving women with low self- esteem.”
Leslie Norris Blackberries
“And the child began to understand that they were very different people; his father, his mother, himself, and that he must learn sometimes to be alone.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 4 EDUCATION
Crow Legend The Creation of the Crow World
“This land is the best of the lands I have made…”
Linda Hogan Dwellings
“I wanted a room apart from others, a hidden cabin to rest in.”
Cherokee Paul McDonald A View from the Bridge
“He was a lumpy little guy with baggy shorts, a faded T-shirt and heavy sweat socks falling down over old sneakers.”
Chang-Rae Lee Mute in an English-Only World
“In the first years we lived in America, my mother could speak only the most basic English, and she often encountered great difficulty when she went out.”
Jose Torres A Letter to a Child Like Me
“Most of all, you should learn that it's you who are responsible for your future.”
Marjorie Agosin Always Living in Spanish
“Only at night, writing poems in Spanish, could I return to my senses, and soothe my own sorrow over what I had left behind.”
Rolando Jorif Thinking
“Freedom, I learned, was a secret and it meant being all alone in the crowd.”
Tom Montgomery-Fate Dancing Geckos
“The children were teaching me a central tenet of cross-cultural work: vulnerability is not weakness.”
Toni Cade Bambara The Lesson
“And Miss Moore asking us do we know what money is, like we a bunch of retards. I mean real money…”
Doris Viloria The Mistress of Make Believe*
“How many of you are ready to let your imagination take you off to distant mystical hands?”
Laura Kuehn Dropout to Graduate*
“My education is priceless to me. It is something that no one can take away.”
Literacy Narratives
Paule Marshall from Poets in the Kitchen
“…they talked-endlessly, passionately, poetically, and with impressive
range. No subject was beyond them.”
Vincent Cremona My Pen Writes in Blue and White
“Learning to see things from these two different points of view has a dramatic effect on the way I communicate.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 5 WORK
Genesis 3:1-9 The Fall
“You shall gain your bread by the sweat of your brow/until you return to the ground.”
Chief Smohalla as told by Herbert J. Spinden My Young Men Shall Never Work
“Men who work cannot dream and wisdom comes in dreams.”
Michael Dorris Life Stories
“The summer I was eighteen a possibility arose for a rotation at the post office, and I grabbed it.”
Andrew Curry Why We Work
“Ringing cell phones, whirring faxes, and ever-present E-mail have blurred the lines between work and home.”
Renee Loth Measuring Success
“Once I actually entered the world of work, however, I learned that success is not so easy to define.”
Gary Soto from Living Up the Street Black Hair
“There are two kinds of work: one uses the mind and the other uses muscle.”
Ellen Ullman Getting Close to the Machine
“I once had a job in which I didn't talk to anyone for two years.”
R.K.Narayan Forty-Five a Month
“There shouldn't be anything more urgent than the office work; go back to your seat.”
Lalita Gandbhir Free and Equal
“He was convinced that he would not get a job if Americans were available…”
Michael Gnolfo A View of Affirmative Action in the Workplace
“The time is right for another step in the evolution of American society.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 6 TRADITIONS
African Legend In the Beginning: Bantu Creation Story
“In the beginning, in the dark, there was nothing but water.”
Quiche-Mayan Legend Quiche-Mayan Creation Story
“Before the world was created, Calm and Silence were the great kings that ruled.”
John King Fairbank Footbinding
“…it was certainly ingenious how men trapped women into mutilating themselves…”
Native American Myth The Algonquin Cinderella
“…the wicked sister would burn her hands and feet with hot cinders…”
Toni Morrison Cinderella's Stepsisters
“I am alarmed by the violence that women do to each other: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence.”
N. Scott Momaday The Way to Rainy Mountain
“Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America.”
Yael Yarimi Seven Days of Mourning*
“…I find myself torn apart between the home I am trying to establish with my American husband, and the great, rich and embracing tradition I have left in my land of birth.”
Salman Rushdie from Imaginary Homelands
“It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.”
Gautam Bhatia New (and Improved) Delhi
“Text messages preserve everyone's dignity by eliminating the human voice.”
Shirley Jackson The Lottery
“…the whole lottery took less than two hours…to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.”
Mark Fineman Stone-Throwing in India: An Annual Bash
“I have seen people with eyes bulging out, ears sheared off, noses broken, teeth shattered, skulls and legs fractured to bits.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 7 CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS
Senegalese Myth The Falsehood of Truth
“Go tell the king that a man is here who can raise people from the dead.”
Jewish Folktale as told by Moses Gaster The Wise Rogue
“On the way to the gallows he said to the governor that he knew a wonderful secret, and it would be a pity to allow it to die with him…”
Garrett Hongo Fraternity
“I was hated one day, and with an intensity I could not have foreseen.”
Taneisha Grant To Speak Patois*
“At fourteen years old, I thought I knew everything there was to know about everything worth knowing-life, people, and relationships.”
Linda Stanley Passion and the Dream
“They have come from so far with so many hopes to this city, the possessors of the same brave American Dream that all immigrants to American have dreamed.”
Alton Fitzgerald White Ragtime, My Time
“I was a victim. They had guns.”
Michael T. Kaufman Of My Friend Hector and My Achilles' Heel
“This story is about prejudice and stupidity. My own.”
Tim O' Brien The Man I Killed
…“Tim, it's a war. The guy wasn't Heidi-He had a weapon, right? It's a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring.”
Literacy Narratives
Gloria Naylor What's in a Name?
“So there must have been dozens of times that the word 'nigger' was spoken in front of me before I reached the third grade. But I didn't 'hear' it until it was said by a small pair of lips that had already learned it could be a way to humiliate me.”
Kenneth Woo Konglish*
“But how can a typical Korean-American have a gift of writing poems? It made no sense.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 8 CHOICES
Swahili Folktale The Wise Daughter
“Eat, you three fools.”
Richard Rodriguez To the Border
“They were men without women. They were Mexicans without Mexico.”
Audre Lorde The Fourth of July
“American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country.”
Marcus Mabry Living in Two Worlds
“Living in my grandmother's house this Christmas break restored all the forgotten, and the never acknowledged, guilt.”
Ramon “Tianguis” Perez The Fender-Bender
“If you'd rather, we can report him to Immigration, the cop continues.”
Hana Wehle Janushinka
“…Also the lights in the nursery were turned out, the curtains drawn. The chuckle of Janushinka was silenced.”
Joseph Steffan Honor Bound
“And I firmly believe that if I had been willing to lie about my sexuality, to deny my true identity, I would have been allowed to graduate.”
Scott Russell Sanders Homeplace
“Claims for the virtues of moving on are familiar and seductive to Americans, this nation founded by immigrants and shaped by restless seekers.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One of These Days
“Now you'll pay for our twenty dead men.”
Yamit Nassiri Flight by Night*
“Yet accepting American values has not made me forget my own customs and traditions.”
The Knowing Eye
CHAPTER 9 POPULAR CULTURE
Charles McGrath The Pleasures of Text
“Compared with the rest of the world, Americans are laggards when it comes to text-messaging.”
Robyn Meredith Big Mall's Curfew Raises Questions of Rights and Bias
“Young people and adults agree that the teenagers can be obnoxious. They race down the halls in groups, scattering shoppers in their paths. They use foul language when shouting to their friends two floors above. Some even drop food or spit over the railings, aiming at shoppers below.”
John Misak Is That Video Game Programming You?
“Killing's a global business, and as it appears, business is good. Billions of dollars good. With more to come.”
Tom Lee The Timeless Culture
“What is the perfectly disjunct vision that separates Toni Morrison from Stephen King; the picture-perfect image that separates Ansel Adams from the paparazzi; what is that perfect fifth that separates The Beatles and Public Enemy?”
James Geasor Whatever Happened to Rock'n Roll?*
“Most popular music concerts today resemble aerobics videos with a soundtrack of sterile music, lip-synched vocals, and performers who care more about image and choreography than musical content.”
Todd Craig …well if you can't hold the torch…then why pass it?
“While we have seen in hip-hop music a time where two to three generations are listening to the same genre of music, this can indeed be a time where they are all listening to the same artist, the same album - the same exact music. But youth culture indeed functions off the premise of rebellion. It is an ironic twist of fate that can and will truly be a test and testament to hip-hop music and culture as we know it.”
Martin Kutnowski I wouldn't have nothing if I didn't have you
“The moral of the story is profound: it's always better to communicate with children through humor and kindness, rather than abusive means.”
Stephen King Why We Crave Horror Movies
“If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree.”
Barry Peters Arnie's Test Day
“So Arnie and his parents spent three hours at the hospital, where Arnie read People magazine instead of Introduction to Physics while waiting for the doctors to report Grampa's condition.”
The Knowing Eye
Rhetorical and Cultural Glossary
Geographical Index
Credits