It is widely used in freshman composition courses at colleges across the United States.
The eleventh edition of the book is composed of over seventy essays, one short story, and one poem.
It is divided into eleven sections by the various methods of development: narration, description, example, comparison and contrast, analysis, process analysis, classification, cause and effect, definition, argument and persuasion, along with a section on mixing the methods.
[2] Numerous essays and stories by noted authors are included in The Bedford Reader.
These include: The text quickly became a standard in college composition courses across the country.