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40 Model Essays: A Portable Anthology
In response to requests from instructors and students for shorter and less expensive composition readers, 40 Model Essays â€� featuring material adapted from the successful The Compact Reader Ìýâ€� offers about half the usual number of readings for about half the price of similar books.
- GenresWritingNonfictionEssays
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 26, 2005
25 people are currently reading
479 people want to read
About the author
Jane E. Aaron
337Ìýbooks7ÌýfollowersJane E. Aaron is a professional writer and editor as well as an experienced teacher. She is the author of the best selling
Little Brown Handbook
and coeditor of the best-selling
Bedford Reader
. She has served as consultant, editor, or writer on more than a dozen other textbooks for the first-year composition course.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 27, 2012
This book has many facets. It is a guide to understanding the writing process-- how a writer can think about crafting an essay, or argument, or speech, or any other piece of writing. As much about the entire process of writing and reading as it is about thinking, 40 Model Essays explores how rhetoric is an effective tool. The essay models serve as a way to teach how reading and writing are interlinked and connected, how style and form can be tools for success . We become better writers through critical reading, thinking deeply about how a writer constructs a passage and builds to their purpose. These essays serve as examples to improving one’s own skill.
40 Model Essays is also a brilliant resource for any high school students who are, or plan to be, in any type of Advanced Placement class, as the focus is on specific forms of essays that they will surely encounter once in college. The essays included are from a wide collection of respected authors from various time periods—David Sedaris, E.B. White, Amy Tan, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, Jr, Jonathan Swift, to name a few. The essays are divided into various modes—such as description, narrative, classification, process analysis, cause and effective, etc—with specific focus questions on meaning, purpose and audience, method and language. There are also tips for writing essays in these various forms, as well as sample topics for practice. A glossary with definitions of various rhetorical terms is in the back of the book.
Sometimes we read, but we don’t really “read� read. This is a book that gets anyone who is interested at all in the writing process to think about how argument is developed, and to dig deeper into the reading process. As much as it is a helpful resource for students, it is equally helpful for instructors who are teaching AP level classes.
One other beauty of this book is simply that it helps you think about writing and reading in a new, insightful way.
40 Model Essays is also a brilliant resource for any high school students who are, or plan to be, in any type of Advanced Placement class, as the focus is on specific forms of essays that they will surely encounter once in college. The essays included are from a wide collection of respected authors from various time periods—David Sedaris, E.B. White, Amy Tan, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, Martin Luther King, Jr, Jonathan Swift, to name a few. The essays are divided into various modes—such as description, narrative, classification, process analysis, cause and effective, etc—with specific focus questions on meaning, purpose and audience, method and language. There are also tips for writing essays in these various forms, as well as sample topics for practice. A glossary with definitions of various rhetorical terms is in the back of the book.
Sometimes we read, but we don’t really “read� read. This is a book that gets anyone who is interested at all in the writing process to think about how argument is developed, and to dig deeper into the reading process. As much as it is a helpful resource for students, it is equally helpful for instructors who are teaching AP level classes.
One other beauty of this book is simply that it helps you think about writing and reading in a new, insightful way.
April 16, 2009
This collection of essays is meant for a professor to read from and teach to their students. It was very intriguing to read what are to be the "model" essays and what can be taught from them. Some of the best essays I've read, a lot of them I read formerly in my first year of college.
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June 9, 2009It sucks!!!
April 30, 2012
Meh. The "craft" chapters would probably be great for a composition class, but were utterly useless for my class on the essay (which was a mid-level combination literature & creative nonfiction class). There are a number of essays in the collection that are highly problematic - which is a great way to introduce examples of what happens when an essayist goes wrong, leaves out, bases arguments on easy assumptions, takes the quick route to conclusions, alienates the reader, etc. - but the pieces are all quite short and thus were easy to work into a reading schedule around my main texts (which is primarily why I chose this book in the first place, because while the book contains a few "important" or iconic or brilliant essays, it's certainly not a book OF important or iconic essays [as opposed to many books that are collected for that type of purpose]). Highly unlikely that I would use it again. Would give it 2.5 stars if that was an option.
A lesson to myself in not choosing/assigning/ordering a text that I'm not already familiar with, just because I think it will be "fun" and "a good experience" to learn a new book over the course of a semester.
A lesson to myself in not choosing/assigning/ordering a text that I'm not already familiar with, just because I think it will be "fun" and "a good experience" to learn a new book over the course of a semester.
August 12, 2010
This is an excellent resource for educators. I just discovered it this summer and I wish I would have discovered it earlier in my teaching career. This is a definite must have.
June 8, 2014
Love this collection... Would be a great tool for English teachers.
October 1, 2018
Good and solid collection of essays - nice intro to form and a decent engaging sampling.
April 26, 2025
This anthology is meant to be used as an instructional tool to teach students how to write better essays. I did not use it in this way. I read most of the essays and found that their quality varied widely. However, I gave it four stars because some of them were truly wonderful--and I likely would not have encountered them together elsewhere. My favorites are:
"The Santa Ana" by Joan Didion
"Black Men and Public Space" by Brent Staples
"Dumpster Diving" by Lars Eighner
"Fatso" by Cheryl Peck
"I Want a Wife" by Judy Brady
"I Have a Dream" by MLK (already read but always worth rereading)
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift (already a favorite)
I skipped all of the instructional notes as my purpose was to discover new essays, not to write them.
"The Santa Ana" by Joan Didion
"Black Men and Public Space" by Brent Staples
"Dumpster Diving" by Lars Eighner
"Fatso" by Cheryl Peck
"I Want a Wife" by Judy Brady
"I Have a Dream" by MLK (already read but always worth rereading)
"A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift (already a favorite)
I skipped all of the instructional notes as my purpose was to discover new essays, not to write them.
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