Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading
“Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading.” This introduction demonstrates a range of methods students can adopt to participate in a meaningful dialogue with each selection. This dialogue—an active, questioning approach to texts and ideas—is one of the keys to critical reading. In the introduction, a portion of Ma chiavelli’s “The Qualities of the Prince” is annotated to help stu- dents follow the key ideas of the piece and to model for students a critical reading process that they can adapt to other essays in the book. The introduction encourages students to mark what they think are the most interesting and important ideas in an essay and high- light or underline all sentences that they might want to quote in an essay of their own.
“Writing about Ideas: An Introduction to Rhetoric.” In the ninth edition, this section, which now immediately follows “Evalu- ating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading,” has been much expanded, with an emphasis on developing thesis statements, using rhetorical methods of development, and thinking critically to construct a strong argument. Many new examples based on current selections in the ninth edition help students find fruitful approaches to the material. This section explains how a reader can make annotations while reading critically and then use those anno- tations to write effectively in response to the ideas presented in any selection in the book. “Writing about Ideas” draws on the annota- tions of the Machiavelli selection illustrated in “Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading.” A sample student essay on Machiavelli, using the techniques taught in the context of read- ing and writing, gives students a model for moving from a critical response to a selection to writing their own material. In addition, this section helps students understand how they can apply some of the basic rhetorical principles discussed throughout the book.
Selection Headnotes. Each selection is preceded by a detailed headnote on the author’s life and work and by comments about the primary ideas presented in the reading. The most interesting rhetorical
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vi PREFACE
aspects of the selection are identified and discussed to help students see how the writer’s rhetorical techniques can achieve specific effects.
Prereading Questions. To emphasize critical thinking, reading, and writing, prereading questions precede every selection. The con- tent of the selections is challenging, and these prereading questions can help students in first-year writing courses overcome minor dif- ficulties in understanding the author’s meaning. These brief questions are designed to help students focus on central issues during their first reading of each selection.
Extensive Apparatus. At the end of each selection is a group of discussion questions designed for use inside or outside the classroom. Questions for Critical Reading focus on key issues and ideas and can be used to stimulate general class discussion and critical thinking. Sugges- tions for Critical Writing help students practice some of the rhetorical strategies employed by the author of a given selection. These sugges- tions ask for personal responses, as well as complete essays that involve research. A number of these assignments, labeled “Connections,” pro- mote critical reading by requiring students to connect particular pas- sages in a selection with a selection by another writer, either in the same part of the book or in another part. The variety of connections is intriguing—Lao-tzu with Machiavelli, Aristotle with Andrew Carnegie, Adam Smith with Thomas Jefferson, Julius K. Nyerere with the fram- ers of the Constitution, Francis Bacon with Howard Gardner, Kwame Anthony Appiah with Iris Murdoch and Michael Gazzaniga, Susanne K. Langer with Noam Chomsky, James Baldwin with Jonathan Kozol, Judith Butler with Margaret Mead, and many more.
The “Visualizing” Feature Encourages Students to Apply Great Ideas to Great Works of Art. Immediately preceding the selections in each part, a well-known painting is accompanied by a commentary that places the work historically and aesthetically and prepares students to make thoughtful connections between the work and the thinkers who follow. For example, “Visualizing Gender and Culture” features Mary Cassatt’s painting In the Loge along with a brief caption and a discus- sion of the work’s exploration of gender roles. The Seeing Connections questions that follow each of the readings ask students to relate a given text to the work of art. Other featured works of art include, but are not limited to, Howard Chandler Christy’s painting Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States for “Visualizing Democracy,” Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People for “Visualizing Government,” Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory for “Visualizing Discoveries and the Mind,” and Wosene Worke Kosrof ’s The Color of Words IX— from his series WordPlay—for “Visualizing Language.”
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PREFACE vii
Instructor’s Resource Manual. I have prepared an extensive manual, Resources for Teaching A WORLD OF IDEAS, that contains further background on the selections, examples from my own class- room responses to the selections, and more suggestions for classroom discussion and student writing assignments. Sentence outlines for the selections—which have been carefully prepared by Michael Hennessy, Carol Verberg, Ellen Troutman, Ellen Darion, and Jon Marc Smith— can be photocopied or downloaded from the book’s companion Web site, bedfordstmartins.com/worldofideas, and given to students. The idea for these sentence outlines came from the phrase outlines that Darwin created to precede each chapter of On the Origin of Species. These outlines may be used to discuss the more difficult selections and to provide additional guidance for students. At the end of the manual, brief bibliographies are provided for all fifty-five authors. These bibli- ographies may be photocopied or downloaded and distributed to stu- dents who wish to explore the primary selections in greater depth.
New in the Ninth Edition
The ninth edition offers a number of new features to help students engage and interact with the texts as they learn to ana- lyze ideas and develop their own thoughts in writing.
Selections and Images Available in e-Pages. As mentioned above, the new edition features online readings—“favorites” from past editions such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “On Education” and Stephen L. Carter’s “The Separation of Church and State”—and full-color versions of the art- work included in the book. Students receive access automatically with the purchase of a new book. If the activation code printed in the inside cover of the student edition is revealed, it might be expired. Students can purchase access at the Student Site. Instructors don’t need an access code; they can access the e-Pages at the Student Site. They can also use the free tools accompanying the e-Pages to upload a syllabus, readings, and assignments to share with the class. Visit bedfordstmartins.com /worldofideas/epages for more information.
New Essential Readings. The selections in A World of Ideas explore the key ideas that have defined the human experience and shaped civiliza- tion. Of the fifty-six selections, twenty-six are new to this edition, includ- ing works by Aristotle, James Madison, the Founding Fathers, Alexis de Tocqueville, Julius K. Nyerere, Benazir Bhutto, Stephen L. Carter, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Gazzaniga, Milton and Rose Fried- man, Hsün Tzu, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Carter G. Woodson, Jonathan Kozol, Howard Gardner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Judith Butler,
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Karen Horney, Susanne K. Langer, Mario Pei, James Baldwin, Bill Bryson, Neil Postman, Noam Chomsky, and Alexander Pope.
Three New Foundational Ideas. The selections in the three new parts—“Democracy,” “Education,” and “Language”—cover con- siderable historical periods and attitudes toward their subjects. All three of these new sections contain ideas that affect every one of us in a number of important ways. Democracy, for example, is in many respects one of the most important ideas of modern times. With political struggles unfolding in developing countries, whose citizens are voting for the first time and writing their own constitutions, few documents could be more important for students to know well than the U.S. Constitution, which appears in this book for the first time. Likewise, the work of James Madison and others in the Federalist Papers points toward political struggles ongoing in modern democra- cies. The section on education introduces students to ideas by Hsün tzu, Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Carter G. Woodson that are still relevant to our schools. The section on language introduces some of the modern ideas about language being “hardwired” in our brains, and it explores some theories of language origin and the development of words from authors such as Mario Pei and Susanne K. Langer.
More “Connections” Questions. Throughout the book, students are asked to make connections and comparisons between writers addressing the same great idea within the same great idea topic and between writers addressing different ideas, helping to stimulate com- parative critical thinking and writing.
Increased Coverage of Developing Theses and Arguments. “Writing about Ideas: An Introduction to Rhetoric” now immediately follows “Evaluating Ideas: An Introduction to Critical Reading” at the beginning of the book, and this section has been expanded to provide support for developing thesis statements, using rhetorical methods of development, and using critical thinking to develop a strong argument. New student writing examples based on selections in the ninth edition help students understand how to approach the material and discuss it meaningfully.