The Essay Connection

The Essay Connection presents a provocative and timely collection of rhetorically arranged essays by professional and student writers that stimulate critical thinking on ethical, social, and political issues, enabling students to make connections and write with a more informed point of view. The essays range from the personal to the scientific and cover a variety of modes?including narration, process analysis, comparison and contrast, and persuasion?to prompt students' interest in different disciplines and genres. Both the professionally written essays (by scientists, economists, and journalists among others) and the student ones inspire and motivate students who are taking composition as a requirement. Most essays are printed in their entirety, serving as better models for student writing than the excerpts often found in other readers. Throughout the text, Bloom offers practical, clear advice on the art of writing that compliments the essays. In addition, rich visuals, fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction provide a full set of models to bolster critical-thinking, reading, and writing skills.

The Eighth Edition offers more than 30 new essays to stimulate students' interest. In addition, an expanded argument casebook as well as new visuals, poems, and works of creative nonfiction and fiction build on the strengths of previous editions, while new material on the Online Study Center for students strengthens students' writing and reading comprehension skills.

• New! More than one third of the 92 readings are new, including essays by Sherman Alexie, Lynda Barry, Chang-rae Lee, Richard Rodriguez, David Sedaris, Sherry Turkle, and Mark Twain.
• New! Two new creative nonfiction essays (Amanda Cagle, "On the Banks of the Bogue Chitto" and Meredith Hall, "Killing Chickens") and two new works of fiction (Elizabeth Tallent, "No One's a Mystery" and Tim O'Brien, "How to Tell a True War Story") show how writers use the techniques of these genres to tell stories.
• New! Six new poems (plus Seamus Heaney's poem in the previous edition, "Horace and Thunder") reflect the rhetorical strategy of the chapters that they begin and also serve as commentaries on the topics of the essays.
• New! New, engaging visuals throughout the text?including selected new opener photos and in-text pictures; an eight-page color photo essay on "War and Peace" to complement the argument casebook; and new cartoons and graphic essays?stimulate students' motivation to learn and illustrate the complex issues within the chapters.
• New! A concluding feature in each chapter shows how one rhetorical strategy, such as definition, can be used in conjunction with another strategy, such as process analysis.
• New! The expanded argument casebook, "Controversy in Context: Implications of World Terrorism and World Peace" now includes nineteen core readings, a portfolio of photographs, and a political cartoon.
• New! The new book-specific Online Study Center for students compliments the book with additional resources for writing and research, visual literacy activities, annotated student essays, flashcards of glossary terms, and ACE practice quizzes that test reading comprehension.
• Twelve complete student essays, as well as excerpts from thirteen student writers' notebooks, provide students with real peer models.
• The author's emphasis on the writing process appears throughout the text, especially in chapter lessons on speaking, reading, writing, and revising. Drafts of a real student paper demonstrate the writing process at work.

Lynn Z. Bloom earned three degrees in English at the University of Michigan, and has an abiding interest in composition and autobiography as subjects for research, teaching, and writing. She has taught and directed writing programs at Butler University (Indianapolis), the University of New Mexico, the College of William and Mary, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She arrived at the University of Connecticut in 1988 as the first holder of an endowed chair, the Aetna Chair of Writing, on the Storrs Campus. In February 2000, she received University of Connecticut's highest academic honor as the newly established Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor. Her research has been supported by the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and--for teaching writing in the Agricultural Sciences--by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Bloom has written 17 books, including DOC FOR SPOCK: BIOGRAPHY OF A CONSERVATIVE RADICAL (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), COMPOSITION STUDIES AS A CREATIVE ART (Utah State, 1988), and THE ESSAY CONNECTION (Cengage). She also has written over 80 articles including, "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise" (1996) and "The Essay Canon" (1999), both in COLLEGE ENGLISH, and "Advancing Composition," a history of advanced composition in the twentieth century, in COMING OF AGE: ADVANCED COMPOSITION AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF ENGLISH STUDIES (ed. L. Shamoon and others; Heinemann, 2000).