Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers

by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa

Expanded to include more writing coverage than any reader of its kind -- with more everyday documents like cartoons, movie posters, poems, Web pages, and advertisements -- this composition classic engages students by showing them the power of language in the world around them.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Writing, Textbooks, Reference, Education, Literature

634 pages, Paperback

Published May 5, 2000

About the author

Paul A. Eschholz

Reviews

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple of summers ago, to brush up on my knowledge of American history, I read a college American history textbook, The American Pageant. In the same spirit, this summer I read another college textbook, Language Awareness, a text on language and writing. Not only was it a good refresher on things I already knew but maybe had forgotten, but there was much in it that was new to me. If the only essay I took anything from was George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," reading the entire book would still have been worth my time. I teach 9th grade English, and there is much I gleaned from Language Awareness that I intend to incorporate in my teaching this coming school year.

One thing I was fascinated by: This book was published in 1991,and a lot has changed in the fifteen years since then, but I was intrigued--and a little bit horrified--to read about concerns that have only worsened in the past decade and a half. For instance, one essay, "Speech Codes on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech" by Nat Hentoff--an essay that was originally written in 1971--warns the reader of the dangers of allowing political correctness to get out of control.

[Amber Ziegler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, I actually read this whole entire book. I'm using it for my freshman writing classes next semester, and wanted to read the whole thing so that I could choose the best essays to have my students read. There's lots of good essays in here, only a few that I really didn't like. Of course, there's lots of questions after the essays that they kind of have to include, which I don't plan on using. In the front section, there is a good bit on reading and writing well that I liked for the most part, and after all the readings, there is a section on how to write a research paper, including things like MLA citation, avoiding plagarism, and incorporating quotes into a paper. So far, I'm very happy with this book and I'm looking forward to using it in the spring.

[Macalester Linguistics]

WL 1.0