Back to the Lake: A Reader and Guide

A new take on the traditional rhetorical modes, showing how they are used in the kinds of writing college students are most often assigned―arguments, analyses, reports, narratives, and more.

Back to the Lake 3e includes new chapters on writing paragraphs and using rhetorical modes in academic writing―which shows how the patterns taught in this book are used in the kinds of writing college students are expected to do. New readings are on timely topics that will engage students. Templates and marginal notes that explicitly link the readings and the writing instruction help students apply the lessons in this book to their own writing.

Thomas Cooley (PhD, Indiana University) is emeritus professor of English at The Ohio State University. In addition to Back to the Lake, he is the editor of The Norton Sampler and the Norton Critical Edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the author of several other books, among them Educated Lives: The Rise of Modern Autobiography in America and The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America.