Looking back over past readings, I found parts of "Black Elk Speaks", "The American Dream" and "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" to be good examples of clear and concise writing. Each writer makes their point in an organized, clean way with descriptive details.
Black Elk mourns the death of Crazy Horse and tells us "Crazy Horse was dead. He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his people, and he fought the Wasichus only when they came to kill us in our own country. He was only thirty years old. They could not kill him in battle. They had to lie to him and kill him that way." (113)
In Jim Cullen's "The American Dream", he writes about the dream of equality, and the changes that took place in mid to late 1800's. He writes, "The acceleration of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century, combined with the growing application of the Darwinian theory of 'the survival of the fittest" to human affairs, popularized a notion of freedom as the right of the individual entrepreneur, like John D. Rockefeller, to make as much money as he could" (107)
Thoreau's "Walden" offers a lot of life advice. In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", he argues that, "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep."
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