The Riverside reader

This is Volume 2 of Houghton Mifflin's new series for the teaching of writing, *The Riverside Readers*. Volume 2 retains the purpose, strategy, and design of the first Riverside Reader but offers a completely new collection of essays—fifty-one in all, drawn as before from a wide variety of sources. Study questions and writing assignments have, of course, also been changed to reflect the new essays. The original Riverside Reader remains in print. The ten sections in this reader are arranged in a sequence that is familiar to most writing teachers. The first eight sections group essays according to traditional writing strategies, beginning with narration and description, mov- , ing through the five expository patterns, and ending with argument. The last two sections are small anthologies—\ Essays for Further Reading (longer and more complex essays that employ several strategies) and Essays on Reading and Writing (essays that illuminate the reading and the writing processes). The selections within each section have been chosen according to five criteria. Length. All essays are brief, some as short as two pages, several as long as twelve to fourteen pages, but most are three to five pages. Level. Within each section the essays are arranged in an order of ascending complexity: the essays at the beginning are short and simple; those near the end are longer and more complicated. Accuracy.