Patterns of Reflection is the only brief reader to provide engaging, readable selections organized by both rhetorical strategies or patterns and by themes.

This reader contains more than eighty selections of varying length including essays, four of which are annotated student essays, short stories, poems, a cartoon, and six pages of four-color fine art to provide variety and to stimulate thinking. Each chapter is enriched by an introduction which provides specific guidelines for understanding the rhetorical pattern illustrated, by vocabulary studies and detailed questions with each reading, and by topics for writing.