The Reader encourages students to explore significant topics that impact their lives and have shaped the wider culture around them.  Classic, timeless readings underscore the staying power of each topic (including identity; marriage and family; faith and religion; language; education; work; wealth and property; popular culture; and war, terrorism, and protest) but are complicated by current issues, contemporary perspectives, and varied genres that offer new opportunities for critique and exploration. 

The Reader draws on research that connects reading and writing in order to help students practice literacy strategies that broaden and strengthen their reading, writing, and researching skills.  Three rhetoric chapters explain how the problem-posing, problem-solving aspects of college-level inquiry require that students engage texts and the research that informs them using a process of thoughtful questioning–and that students bring this questioning methodology to their own processes of inventing, researching, drafting, and revising.