The Norton Sampler: Short Essays for Composition

An outstanding collection of brief essays providing high-interest models of the rhetorical modes, along with beautifully written instruction that demonstrates its own lessons about good writing.

The Norton Sampler is a rhetorically arranged short-essay reader that provides models and guidelines for writing description, narration, and all the other modes of discourse. The readings are brief, reflecting the length of the essays students are required to write.

From classic texts by writers such as Annie Dillard and E. B. White, to contemporary texts from writers like Barack Obama and Marjorie Agosín, The Norton Sampler includes a range of readings that will delight teachers and engage students. Texts from a range of everyday media―from billboards to coffee mugs―demonstrate that the rhetorical modes play an important role in all the writing and reading that we do.

Now with enough writing instruction that students will not need a separate rhetoric.

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.