This portable writing guide and reader presents five highly engaging chapters of readings from five disciplines (communication, psychology, sociology, health, marketing) and a brief writing guide that covers the skills of summary, critique, analysis, and synthesis.

Table of Contents:
** mark new chapters or readings.   Preface   A Note to the Student   I. HOW TO WRITE  SUMMARIES, CRITIQUES, SYNTHESES, AND ANALYSES 1. Summary What is Summary? Can a Summary Be Objective? Using the Summary The Reading Process How to Write Summaries Demonstration:  Summary Avoiding Plagiarism 2. Critical Reading and Critique Critical Reading Critique Demonstration: Critique Practice Critique 3. Synthesis What Is a Synthesis? Purpose Using Your Sources Types of Synthesis: Explanatory and Argument How to Write Syntheses The Argument Synthesis Demonstration: Developing a Source-Based Argument Synthesis: Volunteering in America Developing and Organizing Support for Your Arguments The Explanatory Synthesis Summary ** 4. Analysis What Is an Analysis? Demonstration of Analysis How to Write Analyses Analysis: A Tool for Understanding II. AN ANTHOLOGY OF READINGS    Technology/Communication 5. Cyberspace and Identity    We’ve Got Mail–Always    Andrew Leonard “It saves time and wastes it, makes life simpler and more complicated, brings us together and pushes us apart. Love it or hate it, it’s everywhere, all the time and here to stay.”   Journey of an E-Mail    John Dyson “What happens, exactly, when you hit the “Send” button on your e-mail? Among other things, your message gets smashed to bits.”   **The End of History    Fred Kaplan “E-mail is wrecking our national archive,” argues the author, who is worried that the ephemeral nature of cyber-communication means that no records of our important activities will be available to future historians.   **I Think, Therefore IM Jennifer Lee “B4 we perform ppl have 2 practice.”  Welcome to the brave new linguistic world of IM.   **The Blog Phenomenon   John C. Dvorak “The vanity page is dead; long live the Blog.”   **The Intimacy of Blogs    Michael Snider “Gudy Two Shoes, Rambling Rhodes, Plain Layne.  You may not have heard of these bloggers, but their online readers may suffer withdrawal pains when their sites go down.”   A Shared Sadness    Russ Parsons “A virtual community draws together when one of its members faces heart surgery.”   Virtual Love    Meghan Daum “What happens when two people who develop a passionate e-romance actually meet? A freelance writer describes her own experiences.”   Cyberspace and Identity    Sherry Turkle “Role-playing in cyberspace undermines the idea of a “core” self. Increasingly, on the Internet, multiple identities are the norm–a trend one sociologist finds psychologically healthy.”   Boy, You Fight Like a Girl    Alex Pham “That sexy Amazon warrior in the “crimson cape” and “thigh-high leather boots” that you’re fighting on Ultima Online: are you sure she’s a woman? How gender-switching is making online games not only challenging, but also confusing–and potentially embarrassing.”   The 15 Year-Old Legal Whiz    Michael Lewis “How a 15-year-old kid who’s still in high school became the top-rated legal authority on a major online information site.” Synthesis Activities Research Activities Psychology 6. Obedience to Authority    ** The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal Marianne Szegedy-Maszak A journalist asks how American soldiers could torture and humiliate Iraqi prisdners of war.  Pointing to the experiments of Milgram and Zimbardo (see below), she wonders whether “Everyman is a potential torturer.”   Opinions and Social Pressure    Solomon E. Asch How powerful is group pressure upon the individual? A landmark experiment demonstrates that most people will deny the evidence of their own eyesight sooner than risk appearing out of step with the majority.   The Perils of Obedience    Stanley Milgram A psychologist devises an experiment to test the extent to which people will obey immoral orders. His startling conclusion: that “ordinary people…without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”   Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience    Diana Baumrind A psychologist faults Milgram’s experimental design and argues that social scientists are ethically bound to protect subjects from indignities.   Obedience    Ian Parker The intense reaction to Milgram’s experiment made him famous–and ruined his career.   The Stanford Prison Experiment    Philip K. Zimbardo A psychologist at Stanford University designs an experiment in which college-age men take on the roles of guard and prisoner–with surprising results. “Can it really be,” writes Zimbardo, “that intelligent, educated volunteers could have lost sight of the reality that they were merely acting a part in an elaborate game that would eventually end?”   Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem    Erich Fromm “If mankind commits suicide,” argues this psychologist and philosopher, “it will be because people will obey those who command them to push the deadly buttons; because they will obey the archaic passions of fear, hate, and greed; because they will obey obsolete clichés of State sovereignty and national honor.”   **The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror Crispin Sartwell Surveying the history of genocide in recent centuries, the writer offers the provocative claim that “you and I are deeply evil.”   **Just Do What the Pilot Tells You    Theodore Dalrymple “Blind obedience to authority is just as dangerous as total disregard to all forms of authority,” claims a British physician.  “A civilization requires a delicate balance between the two forces for it to become stable enough to proceed to the next phase of its development.”   Synthesis Activities Research Activities   American Studies / Sociology   ** 7. What's Happening at the Mall?  (All contents are new to this edition) Shopping for American Culture           James Farrell An American Studies scholar suggests that we find in shopping malls (no less than in college and churches) answers to critical questions such as "What does it mean to be human?  What are people for?"   A Social History of Shopping Laura Paquet Thirty-six hundred years ago, "in the Mesopotamian city of Ur, [we find the first example of] separating a street of shops from the rest of town with doors that were closed at night."   Main Street Revisited Richard Francaviglia A geographer traces how, in fashioning a romanticized version of small-town America's Main Street for his theme park, Walt Disney created a model for the modern shopping mall.   Shopping Towns USA Victor Gruen and Larry Smith The pioneer of the modern shopping center shares his vision of how carefully planned malls will provide "in modern community life [what] the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place and our own Town Squares provided in the past."   Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured: One Week at the Mall of America David Guterson After spending a week at the just-opened "monolithic and imposing" Mall of America, an essayist and novelist predicts that malls will become "planets unto themselves, closed off from this world in the manner of space stations."   The Shopping Mall as Sacred Space                            Ira Zepp, Jr. A professor of religious studies finds in the architecture of malls the sacred geometry of a "center" that, like the design of cathedrals, offers visitors order and serenity in an otherwise chaotic world.    From Town Center to Shopping Center                        Lizabeth Cohen An historian tracing the movement of town centers from Main Street commercial districts to suburban malls identifies two disturbing trends: a pattern of racial segregation and a "privatization" of public space.   Community Through Exclusion and Illusion                 George Lewis Mall management likes to project a community-friendly face to the world, but a sociologist asks, how real are these communities?  Are they a "manufactured illusion or social reality?"   Mallaise: How to Know If You Have It                William Kowinski Do you sweat or swoon in malls?  Do you feel dismayed, dislocated, "enclosed in a cocoon of blandness"?  You may be suffering from mal de mall.    Synthesis Activities Research Activities Nutrition/Health Sciences   8. The Weight Debate **Rethinking Weight Amanda Spake With 64% of Americans overweight or obese, a senior writer for U.S. News and World Report asks: Is it time that we regard obesity as a disease?   Caloric Imbalance and Public Health Policy    Jeffrey P. Koplan and William H. Dietz The lead editorial for a 1999 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association devoted to obesity research calls for concerted effort to defeat an “epidemic.”   Prevalence of Obesity Among U.S. Adults, by Characteristics and by State    Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Two tables summarize a recently completed, multiyear study on the prevalence of obesity in America–across age groups and across regions.   Too Much of a Good Thing    Greg Crister A journalist calls for us to stigmatize “the unhealthful behaviors that cause obesity” and to teach children that “[e]ating too much food is a bad thing.”   NAAFA Policy on Dieting and the Diet Industry    National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance An organization dedicated to empowering fat people claims that the “diet industry’s advertising and marketing strategy is based on the creation and perpetuation of fear, biases, and stereotypes.”   Fat and Happy: In Defense of Fat Acceptance    Mary Ray Worley A woman who has struggled with her weight attends a NAAFA convention and discovers a “new planet” on which fat people accept their bodies and themselves–without self-loathing.   Too “Close to the Bone”: The Historical Context for Women’s Obsession with Slenderness    Roberta Seid A gender studies scholar reviews changing attitudes regarding fat and the cultural and spiritual dangers of our current preoccupation with slenderness.   Fat and Happy?    Hillel Schwartz An historian shows us what the world would look like in a “Fat Utopia.”   **The Ironic Politics of Obesity    Marion Nestle In an editorial for the journal Science, a professor of Nutrition and Food Studies asks: How could a single federal health agency be responsible for both promoting the interests of the food industry and advising Americans on how to lose weight?   The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Eating    Atul Gawande A physician reflects on gastric-bypass surgery, in which the stomach of an obese patient is radically reduced in size until “it [can] hold no more than a shot glass.”   Synthesis Activities Research Activities   BUSINESS/MARKETING   ** 9. New and Improved: Six Decades of Advertising (All contents are new to this edition) Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals    Jib Fowles “[A]n advertising message contains something primary and primitive, an emotional appeal, that in effect is the thin edge of the wedge, trying to find its way into a mind.”  Advertisements are designed to appeal to the “unfulfilled urges and motives swirling in the bottom half of our minds.”   Making the Pitch in Print Advertising    Courtland Bovée, John V. Thill, George P. Dovel, Marian Burk Wood Is copywriting an art?  If so, it’s “art in pursuit of a business goal.”  Here are the main types of headlines and body copy in the hundreds of ads we see every week.   Elements of Effective Layout Dorothy Cohen Graphics, even more than words, are crucial to communicating advertising messages.  The author discusses the chief elements of visual communication: balance, proportion, movement, and emphasis.   The Indictments against Advertising    Courtland Bovée, William F. Arens Does advertising make us more materialistic?  Does it manipulate us into wanting and buying things we don’t need?  Does it perpetuate gender and racial stereotypes?   The authors consider some of the chief charges leveled at the advertising industry.   A Portfolio of Advertisements: 1945-2003    Presenting, for your consideration, a series of 41 striking advertisements produced over the past six decades.  No obligation to buy.   Synthesis Activities Research Activities