A Writer's Reference with Exercises

GO DIGITAL WITH ACHIEVE.

Helping college writers achieve more. As always.

A Writer’s Reference has offered clear and quick answers to tough questions for millions of college writers. With a groundbreaking tabbed, lay-flat format and a first-of-its-kind directness, it helped a generation of students engage in their own writing and meet the challenges of the composition course. As we celebrate the 10th edition, we invite you to see our latest innovation--our latest answer to the question we have been asking for 35 years: How can we help? We help with superior content developed by experienced authors and shaped by faculty and student advisers. And we help with Achieve, a first-of-its-kind suite of digital tools paired with content you trust.

Achieve with A Writer’s Reference lets you engage students in new ways. They do the work of the composition course in a contained and active writing space: they read, write, reflect, respond to peers, consult the handbook, and make action plans. And instructors use Achieve to design and facilitate writing assignments, peer review, and reflection. The best part? Achieve gives you deeper visibility into students’ writing processes--lets you see “between the drafts.” Insights for each writer and for each class provide actionable information about how your students are responding to expectations, allowing you to see, foster, and measure progress. The 10th edition is an innovation celebration--a continued commitment to college writers and teachers of writing.

Features:

Superior content that’s authoritative and trustworthy. With the tenth edition of A Writer’s Reference with Exercises, students have content written by widely respected authors and class-tested by hundreds of thousands of students and instructors. Users who loved the writing guides and how-to pages in the ninth edition will be pleased to know they are still here in the tenth — as are the engaging writing videos that help with argument, analysis, and annotated bibliography.

Covers all the topics for composition. A Writer’s Reference with Exercises supports students as they compose for different purposes and audiences and in a variety of genres and as they collaborate, revise deeply, conduct research, document sources, format their writing, and edit for clarity. Neither Google nor an OWL can give students the confidence that comes with a coherent reference that covers all the topics they need in a writing course.

Easy to use. Edition after edition, users praise the clean and open design that lets students breathe. Students themselves say the book is "not intimidating" and "not overwhelming." The emphasis on clear, direct advice, examples that teach, and useful navigation means students find solutions to writing problems quickly--and easily understand and apply what they find.

Unparalleled service and support. Bedford/St. Martin’s has been in the field of composition with you for more than thirty-five years. We provide professional resources, professional development workshops, training for digital tools, consultation about tailoring your materials, and quick, personal service when you need it.

Available in multiple versions to suit your needs. Choose from a classic 12-tabbed reference book, a version with integrated exercises, and a version with help for writing about literature. A custom version is also an appealing option (enrollment minimums apply).

New in this Edition:

Achieve--a new digital composition space designed for engagement. Co-designed with composition instructors and students from across the country, Achieve is an exciting, new, and comprehensive set of interconnected teaching and assessment tools. It offers new ways to engage students and to assign and facilitate writing, reflection, and peer review.

• Writing tools keep writing and revising at the center of your course. Draft Goals focus students, feedback tools help you target problems, reflection prompts increase rhetorical awareness, and the Revision Plan makes feedback actionable.
• Pre-built assignments make your life easier. Each one can be assigned as-is or customized: analysis, argument, annotated bibliography, narrative, reflection, and research.
• An interactive e-book version of A Writer’s Reference, built in to Achieve, brings together the resources students need to prepare for class. Students can download the e-book to read offline or to have read aloud to them.
• Built-in Source Check plagiarism prevention software guides students as they learn to be responsible academic researchers. Diagnostics and individualized study plans give students ownership of their learning process.
• Powerful trends, insights, and reports for each assignment inform your teaching and feedback and help you visualize and measure students’ progress.

Reorganized for academic writers. To make using A Writer’s Reference with Exercises easier than ever, we’ve clustered all of the material critical to the composition course and essential for the most common assignments up front: coverage of the writing process, critical reading, argument and analysis — and now research and documentation. The first half of the book becomes a robust how-to guide, and the second half of the book functions as a quick reference for style, grammar, and punctuation topics designed for writers with a wide variety of experience with English.

More help with paraphrasing and fact checking. The new edition includes stronger help for working with sources. A new how-to guide gives students a writing process for paraphrasing original material, along with a concrete example to follow. New advice for detecting false and misleading sources encourages students to ask critical questions about the news, data, and other information they encounter as part of an academic or everyday writing task.

New "Note to self" feature that encourages good writers’ habits. Aligned with the pedagogy of Achieve, the handbook helps students with reflection and revision planning. A new boxed feature models the kind of thinking and planning that successful writers do as they move from assignment to draft or from one draft to another. Both Achieve and the handbook foster the active and personalized learning that research shows leads to greater success rates for a wide variety of students.

A more engaging visual approach. For students who respond to information presented visually, we offer new visuals to complement the written instruction in sections that cover working with sources, testing assumptions, writing conclusions, integrating sources, and understanding the rhetorical situation.

A new resource for corequisite composition. For students enrolled in paired, corequisite, or ALP sections of composition, A Student’s Companion to Hacker Handbooks offers practical support that will help them get up to speed and perform on-level. The resource, available in print or in Achieve, includes more than 60 exercises for grammar, research, and writing; graphic organizers for many types of essays and paragraphs; substantial support for college reading; numerous reflection activities; outline templates; and more.

About the Authors

Diana Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students over thirty-five years at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, where she was a member of the English faculty. Hacker handbooks, built on innovation and on a keen understanding of the challenges facing student writers, are the most widely adopted in America. Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, include A Writer’s Reference, Ninth Edition (2018); A Pocket Style Manual, Eighth Edition (2018); The Bedford Handbook, Tenth Edition (2017); Rules for Writers, Eighth Edition (2016); and Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version.

Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles “Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers” and “Responding to Student Writing” are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition. Recently she has been exploring different audiences through blogging and through publishing in popular media. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Tenth Edition (2013).