Professional Documents
Culture Documents
andrea lunsford
stanford universit y
michal brody
lisa ede
oregon state universit y
beverly j. moss
the ohio state universit y
keith walters
portl and state universit y
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Acknowledgments
We are profoundly grateful to the many people who have helped bring Ev-
eryone’s an Author into existence. Indeed, this text provides a perfect ex-
ample of what an eighteenth-century German encyclopedia meant when
it defined book as “the work of many hands.” Certainly this one is the work
of many hands, and among those hands none have been more instrumental
than those of Marilyn Moller: the breadth of her vision is matched by her
meticulous attention to detail, keen sense of style and design, and ability
to get more work done than anyone we have ever known. Throughout the
process of conceiving and composing this text, she has set the bar high for
us, and we’ve tried hard to reach it. For this edition, we have been graced
and advice in revising every chapter of this book. Special thanks to Forster
Agama, Tallahassee Community College; Jacob Babb, Indiana University
Southeast; Edward Baldwin, College of Southern Nevada; Brooke Ballard,
Lone Star College-CyFair; Nancy Barendse, Charleston Southern University;
Dawn Bergeron, St. Johns River State College; J. Andrew Briseño, Northwest-
ern State University; Paul Cook, Indiana University Kokomo; Adrienne J.
Daly, University of Rhode Island; Christine Davis, Northern Arizona Uni-
versity; James M. Decker, Illinois Central College; Sara DiCaglio, Texas A&M
University; Beth Ebersbaker, Lee College; Michael Emerson, Northwestern
Michigan College; Michael Faris, Texas Tech University; Wioleta Fedeczko,
Utah Valley University; Bill FitzGerald, Rutgers University-Camden; Stepha-
nie Freuler, Valencia State College; Jennifer Holly-Wells, Montclair State Uni-
versity; Debra Knutson, Shawnee State University; Lynn C. Lewis, Oklahoma
State University; Cathy Mahaffey, University of North Carolina, Charlotte;
Sadeem El Nahhas, Northwestern State University; Nicole F. Oechslin, Pied-
mont Virginia Community College; Kate Pantelides, Middle Tennessee State
University; Jerry Petersen, Utah Valley University; Mary Jo Reiff, University
of Kansas; Thomas Reynolds, Northwestern State University; Janice Rie-
man, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; Mary Elizabeth Rogers, Florida
Gateway College; Pamela Saunders, Suffolk University; Emerson Schroeter,
Northern Arizona University; Shawna Shapiro, Middlebury College; Kaia
Simon, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; Kristen Snoddy, Indiana Univer-
sity Kokomo; Daniel Stanford, Pitt Community College; Shannon C. Stew-
art, Coastal Carolina University; Emily Suh, Texas State University; Edwin
Turner, St. Johns River State College; Verne Underwood, Rogue Community
College; Melanie Verner, Lee College; Courtney Wooten, George Mason Uni-
versity; Craig Wynne, Hampton University; and Vershawn Ashanti Young,
University of Waterloo.
We’d also like to thank those reviewers who helped us to shape the
previous editions: Stevens Amidon, Indiana University-Purdue Fort Wayne;
Georgana Atkins, University of Mississippi; Michelle Ballif, University of
Georgia; Larry Beason, University of South Alabama, Mobile; Kristen Belcher,
University of Colorado, Denver; Samantha Bell, Johnson County Community
College; Cassandra Bishop, Southern Illinois University; Kevin Boyle, College
of Southern Nevada; Erin Breaux, South Louisiana Community College; Eliz-
abeth Brockman, Central Michigan University; Stephen Brown, University
of Nevada, Las Vegas; Ellie Bunting, Edison State College; Vicki Byard, North-
eastern Illinois University; Maggie Callahan, Louisiana State University;
Laura Chartier, University of Alaska, Anchorage; Tera Joy Cole, Idaho State
Jason Tham, St. Cloud State University; Tom Thompson, The Citadel; Jennifer
Vala, Georgia State University; Rex Veeder, St. Cloud State University; Emily
Ward, Idaho State University; Matthew Wiles, University of Louisville; Lau-
ren Woolbright, Clemson University; and Mary Wright, Christopher New-
port University.
Collectively, we have taught for over 150 years: that’s a lot of classes, a
lot of students—and we are grateful for every single one of them. We owe
some of the best moments of our lives to them—and in our most challenging
moments, they have inspired us to carry on. In Everyone’s an Author, we are
particularly grateful to the student writers whose work adds so much to this
text: Ade Adegboyega, Rutgers University; Crystal Aymelek, Portland State
University; Halle Edwards, Stanford University; Ryan Joy, Portland State
University; Julia Landauer, Stanford University; Larry Lehna, University of
Michigan, Dearborn; Melanie Luken, The Ohio State University; David Pasi-
ni, The Ohio State University; Walter Przybylowski, Rutgers University; Me-
lissa Rubin, Hofstra University; Shuqiao Song, Stanford University; Katryn
Sheppard, Portland State University; Katherine Spriggs, Stanford University;
Manisha Ummadi, University of California, Berkeley; Saurabh Vaish, Hofs-
tra University; Yuliya Vayner, Hunter College; and Kameron Wiles, Ball State
University.
Each of us also has special debts of gratitude. Andrea Lunsford thanks
her students and colleagues at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English and
in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford, along with her sisters El-
len Ashdown and Liz Middleton, editor and friend Marilyn Moller, friends
and life supporters Shirley Brice Heath, Betty Bailey, Cheryl Glenn, Beverly
Moss, Marvin Diogenes, and Adam Banks; and especially—and forever—her
grandnieces Audrey and Lila Ashdown, already compelling authors.
Michal Brody would like to thank her two wonderful families in the
United States and Yucatán who so graciously support (and endure) her crazy
and restless transnational life. Her conversations with each and all of those
loved ones provide the constant impetus to reach for clarity and honesty of
expression. She also thanks her students in both countries, who remind her
every day that we are all teachers, all learners.
Lisa Ede thanks her husband, Greg Pfarr, for his support, for his commit-
ment to his own art, and for their year-round vegetable garden. Thanks as
well to her siblings, who have stuck together through thick and thin: Leni
Ede Smith, Andrew Ede, Sara Ede Rowkamp, Michele Ede Smith, Laurie Ede
Drake, Robert Ede, and Julie Ede Campbell. She also thanks her colleagues in
the Oregon State School of Writing, Literature, and Film for their encourage-
ment and support.
Beverly Moss thanks her parents, Harry and Sarah Moss, for their love,
encouragement, and confidence in her when her own wavered. In addition,
she thanks her Ohio State and Bread Loaf students, who inspire her and
teach her so much about teaching. She also wants to express gratitude to
her colleagues in Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy at Ohio State for their
incredible support. Finally, she thanks two of her own former English teach-
ers, Dorothy Bratton and Jackie Royster, for the way they modeled excellence
inside and outside the classroom.
Carole Clark Papper would like to thank her husband, Bob, and wonder-
ful children—Dana, Matt, Zack, and Kate—without whose loving support
little would happen and nothing would matter. In addition, she is grateful
for the inspiration and support over the years of teachers, colleagues, and
students at Ohio State, Ball State, and Hofstra, but especially for Beverly
Moss and Andrea Lunsford for launching her on this journey.
Keith Walters thanks his partner of thirty-seven years and husband of
fourteen, Jonathan Tamez, for sharing a love of life, language, travel, flow-
ers, and beauty. He is also grateful to his students in Tunisia, South Carolina,
Texas, Oregon, and Palestine who have challenged him to find ways of talk-
ing about what good writing is and how to do it.
Finally, we thank those who have taught us—who first helped us learn
to hold a pencil and print our names, who inspired a love of language and of
reading and writing, who encouraged us to take chances in writing our lives
as best we could, who prodded and pushed when we needed it, and who
most of all set brilliant examples for us to follow. One person who taught
almost all of us—about rhetoric, about writing, and about life—was Edward
P. J. Corbett. We remember him with love and with gratitude
—Andrea Lunsford, Michal Brody, Lisa Ede,
Beverly Moss, Carole Clark Papper, Keith Walters
Preface v
Introduction: Is Everyone an Author? xxix
1 Thinking Rhetorically 5
First, Listen 8
Hear What Others Are Saying—and Think about Why 9
What Do You Think—and Why? 10
Do Your Homework 11
Give Credit 13
Be Imaginative 13
Put In Your Oar 15
3 Rhetorical Situations 28
Genre 30
Audience 31
Purpose 32
[ xvii ]
Stance 33
Context 33
Medium and Design 34
6 Reading Rhetorically 67
Thinking about Your Rhetorical Situation 69
Becoming an Active, Engaged Reader 69
Fast—and Slow—Reading 70
Unfamiliar or Difficult Texts 72
On-Screen and Off 72
Across Genres 76
Across Academic Disciplines 77
Summarizing 86
Responding 88
Summary/Response Essays 90
yuliya vayner, The Higher Price of Buying Local 93
READINGS
russel honoré, Work Is a Blessing 162
jaron lanier, Delete Your Social Media Accounts Right Now 172
katherine spriggs, On Buying Local 177
READINGS
wikipedia, Gender 298
bill laitner, Heart and Sole: Detroiter Walks 21 Miles to Work 304
barry estabrook, Selling the Farm 318
ryan joy, The Right to Preach on a College Campus 324
Had Burns lived till 1802, who knows to what his politics might have
led him? He would then have been still only in his forty-fourth year;
and what fate more imaginable for him, had he been still alive, than
that, deprived of his gaugership, or throwing it up, he should have
left Dumfries for Edinburgh, and, associating himself there with the
many who would have welcomed him, and with whom, whatever
their rank, there was no fear that his relations would have ever been
other than those of perfect equality, he should have become the
editor, mayhap, of a Whig newspaper? If so, who can doubt that
prose would have become easier to him, that he would have been a
power among the Scottish Whigs, and that his influence would have
been felt, in his new character, by them and by the nation? Ah! and,
had he lived on through all their coming struggles, would he not have
been but seventy-three years of age at the time of the passing of the
Reform Bill; and, in gratitude to him as a veteran Whig and ex-
editor, might not his fellow-citizens at last have returned him to the
House of Commons as the senior colleague of young Macaulay?
—“Profanation! profanation!” is the cry that will rise to all Scottish
lips on the mere muttering of such a fancy. Nature herself had been
of that opinion. Burns had died in 1796, in the thirty-eighth year of
his age, a broken-down exciseman, in Dumfries; and he was to be
remembered to all eternity,—thank God!—simply as Robert Burns.
The required party-standard was raised by the young Whigs of
Edinburgh. It was in Jeffrey’s humble domicile, in an upper storey in
one of the houses of Buccleuch Place, that, on one memorable day in
the year 1802, Sydney Smith first started the idea of a new
periodical, combining literature with politics, to be published
quarterly, and kept up by contributions from the teeming minds of
the members of the Speculative Society. No sooner said than done:
Constable at once undertook the publication; and on the 10th of
October 1802 the first number of the Edinburgh Review saw the
light. For a number or two the editorship was the joint-occupation of
Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Horner, Brougham, and a few others,—
Sydney Smith officiating in chief; but, on Smith’s return to London
soon afterwards, the management fell exclusively on Jeffrey.
The establishment of the Edinburgh Review, as all the world
knows, was the beginning of a new era in the history of British
politics. For a while, indeed, it was rather as a power in the general
thought and literature of the country than as a direct force in politics
that the new organ made itself felt. For its success in the latter
function circumstances for the first two or three years were not very
propitious. The war with France having been renewed in 1803, and
the Addington ministry having resigned in May 1804, and Pitt having
then resumed the Premiership with Dundas (now Lord Melville) as
again his principal colleague and at the head of the Admiralty, not
only were the Scottish Tories once more in a mood of placid
satisfaction over this change, and over the prospect which it brought
of a reassured term of the Dundas proconsulship in Scotland; but the
very occasion of the recall of Pitt to power, the very nature of the
business in which Pitt and Dundas had to exert themselves, tended
for the time to a modification, or at least a postponement, of party
differences. Napoleon was now Emperor of the French; what he
threatened now was an actual invasion of Britain; how could party
differences continue operative in any virulent degree in face of such a
common danger?
Party differences did subside for the while. All over the island
Whigs and Tories alike were in a ferment of volunteering and drilling
for resistance to the French when they should land; and was it not a
Whig admiral that, having won for all Britain the glory, willingly
bequeathed to a Tory Government the usufruct, of the great battle of
Trafalgar? People were at no leisure to listen with sufficient attention
at such a time to expositions of the superiority of Whig principles,
even from such an organ as the Edinburgh Review.
In 1806, however, the face of things was suddenly altered. The
death of Pitt in the January of that year, when his second
administration was already tottering under the blow inflicted upon it
by the impeachment of Lord Melville, brought it to an abrupt close;
and the Whigs, no less to their own surprise than to that of the
country, found themselves again in power, after an interval since
their last real experience of that ecstasy which could be spanned by
the memory only of old people then living. The accession to office of
the Whig ministry of Fox and Grenville was startling enough, even
had there been no especially Whiggish acts to correspond. But,
during the thirteen months of the Fox and Grenville ministry
(January 1806—March 1807), there were acts to correspond, over
and above the prosecution of the Melville Impeachment to its
conclusion. As places fell vacant, Whigs were appointed to them; an
attempt was made to open negotiations for peace with Napoleon; and
various measures of domestic reform were introduced into
Parliament. To the Scottish Tories it was as if chaos had come again.
Could they have foreseen that the crisis was to be so short,—could
they have foreseen that the new Whig ministry, after having been
weakened by the death of Fox in September 1806, would be able to
struggle on but for six months more, and that then the Whigs would
be driven back into their accustomed place as a minority in
opposition, with another quarter of a century of uninterrupted Tory
administration for Britain, and of a modified Dundas rule in
Scotland, to intervene before they should again rise to supremacy,—it
is possible that the consternation would have been less. But this at
the time could not have been foreseen. The accession of the Whigs to
power, and their retention of it during a whole year, were a rude
awakening to men who had been asleep; and from that moment
Toryism had bad dreams.
The crisis was powerfully felt in Edinburgh; and all that remains
for us in this paper is to move forward from 1802 to 1806, for a
glance at the state of Edinburgh in this latter year, when the effects of
the crisis there were most acute.
As was natural, the mere lapse of time, independently of the
special events that had been happening, had produced some
changes. Of the seniors, both of the Whig and of the Tory party, that
have been noted as alive in 1802, some had been removed by death;
and, by these and other deaths, those who in 1802 had occupied
junior positions in their respective parties found themselves
promoted to higher places, and to more active concern in party
affairs. Among the Tories of the Parliament House the most active
heads, besides Robert Dundas of Arniston as Chief Baron of
Exchequer, were Hope, now Lord Justice-Clerk in the place of old
Esky, and Blair, afterwards Lord President; but among the younger
men who acted with these there was no one whose name stood
higher, or whose Toryism was more enthusiastic, than Scott. During
the four years that had elapsed since 1802 his literary reputation had
been gradually rising; and the publication in 1805 of his Lay of the
Last Minstrel had given him rank among the most popular poets of
his age, and diffused among his countrymen for the first time some
adequate conception of the nature and the measure of his genius. His
literary celebrity had not been without its effect on his worldly
circumstances; for, besides retaining his Sheriffship, he was now
settled for life in the Clerkship of the Court of Session. Very similar
to the position which Scott thus held among the Edinburgh Tories in
1806 was the position which Jeffrey then held among the Edinburgh
Whigs. The active heads of the Whig party in the Parliament House
were such seniors as Harry Erskine, John Clerk of Eldin, and Adam
Gillies. On the accession of the Fox and Grenville Ministry to office,
Erskine had become Lord Advocate, Clerk had been made Solicitor-
General, and Hay, another of the older set of Whig lawyers, had been
raised to the bench. But, under those men, Jeffrey was now a person
of far more consequence than he had been in 1802. Then he was only
a rising junior in that set of independent young Whigs whom their
elders were disposed rather to slight than to encourage; but his
rapidly increasing distinction at the Bar, not to speak of the
distinction accruing to him from the fame of the Edinburgh Review,
had broken down the reserve of his seniors and compelled them to
yield him due respect. Had Horner and Brougham remained in
Edinburgh, they and Jeffrey might have been a kind of triumvirate,
dividing among them the increased consideration which was now
accorded to the younger portion of the Whig bar. But Horner and
Brougham, as well as Allen and others of the little band of 1802, had
by this time migrated to London, whence they kept up their
connection with Edinburgh chiefly by correspondence and by
contributions to the Review; and, as Cockburn and Murray had not
yet attained a standing at the bar equal to Jeffrey’s, there was no
doubt as to his individual supremacy among the younger resident
Edinburgh Whigs.
Scott and Jeffrey: these names represent, therefore, the heartiest
Toryism of Scotland and its most hopeful and opinionative
Whiggism, as they stood opposed to each other in Edinburgh society
in the year 1806. Remembering this, and with the well-known
portraits of the two men in our minds, we can read the following
passage in Lockhart’s Life of Scott with a new sense of its
significance:—
“Scott’s Tory feelings appear to have been kept in a very excited state during
the whole of the short reign of the Whigs. He then, for the first time, mingled
keenly in the details of county politics—canvassed electors—harangued meetings;
and, in a word, made himself conspicuous as a leading instrument of his party. But
he was, in truth, earnest and serious in his belief that the new rulers of the country
were disposed to abolish many of its most valuable institutions; and he regarded
with special jealousy certain schemes of innovation with respect to the courts of
law and the administration of justice which were set on foot by the crown-officers
for Scotland. At a debate of the Faculty of Advocates on some of these propositions
he made a speech much longer than he had ever before delivered in that assembly;
and several who heard it have assured me that it had a flow and energy of
eloquence for which those who knew him best were quite unprepared. When the
meeting broke up, he walked across the Mound, on his way to Castle Street,
between Mr. Jeffrey and another of his reforming friends, who complimented him
on the rhetorical powers he had been displaying, and would willingly have treated
the subject-matter of the discussion playfully. But his feelings had been moved to
an extent far beyond their apprehension. He exclaimed ‘No, no—’tis no laughing
matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and
undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain.’ And, so
saying, he turned round to conceal his agitation—but not until Mr. Jeffrey saw
tears gushing down his cheek,—resting his head, until he recovered himself, on the
wall of the Mound.”
Edinburgh in 1806 is painted for us in that incident. Of the two
men seen standing together on the Mound, under the tall clump of
old houses which still on that spot arrests the eye of the visitor, the
stalwart fair-haired one, leaning his head on the wall to conceal his
tears, is the genius of the Scottish past, while his less moved
companion, of smaller stature, with dark keen features and piercing
hazel eyes, is the confident spirit of the Scottish future. There was,
indeed, one element, then in making for the Scottish future, no
representation of which was discernible in Jeffrey, and which was
not logically involved in any ostensible form of Scottish Political
Whiggism. This was that fervour of a revived Evangelicism in
Theology the effects of which on the national character and the
national polity of Scotland have been so strikingly visible through the
last two generations and more. But this was a manifestation of later
date, which even the closest observer of 1806 could hardly have pre-
imagined. The traditional germ existed in Sir Henry Moncreiff; but
the full development was to come with the combative Calvinistic and
Presbyterian energy of Andrew Thomson, and the grander and richer
genius of Thomas Chalmers.
THE LAST YEARS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT[8]