A Writer's Reference / Edition 9

by Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers

Overview

A Hacker handbook has always been a how-to manual for building confidence as a college writer. Diana Hacker conceived A Writer’s Reference as a quick-access innovation in handbook format, and Nancy Sommers continues to reinvent its content for an evolving course emphasizing critical reading and writing. For more than 25 years, the book has allowed students to build confidence and take ownership of their college writing experience.

A Writer’s Reference, Ninth Edition, and LaunchPad for A Writer’s Reference together represent a next-level tool for college writers. What’s most exciting? An emphasis on help that is personal, practical, and digital. A Writer’s Reference is reimagined as a system that helps students target their needs and see their successes; that offers innovative practice with writing, reading, thinking, and research; and that lives in an engaging multimedia environment.

Diagnostics, e-book tools, and custom options allow students and teachers to personalize the handbook. How-to pages, writing guides, student models, and exercises and activities deliver pragmatic, transferable lessons. And with a more interactive e-book, 24 new video tutorials for argument, analysis, research, and citation, and tools that make assigning and assessing a breeze, LaunchPad will be the digital solution that boosts your confidence as well as your students’. A Writer’s Reference, class tested by literally millions of college writers, still offers the right stuff.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781319057442
Publisher:	Bedford/St. Martin's
Publication date:	09/15/2017
Edition description:	Ninth Edition
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

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 The Bedford Handbook, Ninth Edition (2014); A Writer’s Reference, Eighth Edition (2015); Rules for Writers, Seventh Edition (2012); and A Pocket Style Manual, Seventh Edition (2015).
 
Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at 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.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (2010).

 

Table of Contents

Writing well
C COMPOSING AND REVISING

C1 Planning

C2 Drafting

C3 Reviewing, revising, and editing

C4 Preparing a portfolio; reflecting on your writing

C5 Writing paragraphs

A ACADEMIC READING, WRITING, AND SPEAKING

A1 Reading and writing critically

A2 Reading and writing about multimodal texts

A3 Reading arguments

A4 Writing arguments

A5 Speaking confidently

A6 Writing in the disciplines

S SENTENCE STYLE

S1 Parallelism

S2 Needed words

S3 Problems with modifiers

S4 Shifts

S5 Mixed constructions

S6 Sentence emphasis

S7 Sentence variety

WORD CHOICE

W1 Glossary of usage

W2 Wordy sentences

W3 Active verbs

W4 Appropriate language

W5 Exact language

Writing correctly
GRAMMATICAL SENTENCES

G1 Subject-verb agreement

G2 Verb forms, tenses, and moods

G3 Pronouns

G4 Adjectives and adverbs

G5 Sentence fragments

G6 Run-on sentences

MULTILINGUAL WRITERS AND ESL TOPICSM1 Verbs

M2 Articles

M3 Sentence structure

M4 Using adjectives

M5 Prepositions and idiomatic expressions

M6 Paraphrasing sources effectively

PUNCTUATION AND MECHANICS

P1 The comma

P2 Unnecessary commas

P3 The semicolon and the colon

P4 The apostrophe

P5 Quotation marks

P6 Other punctuation marks

P7 Spelling and hyphenation

P8 Capitalization

P9 Abbreviations and numbers

P10 Italics

BASIC GRAMMAR

B1 Parts of speech

B2 Sentence patterns

B3 Subordinate word groups

B4 Sentence types

Writing with sources
R RESEARCHING

R1 Thinking like a researcher; gathering sources

R2 Managing information; taking notes responsibly

R3 Evaluating sources

MLA Papers

MLA-1 Supporting a thesis

MLA-2 Citing sources; avoiding plagiarism

MLA-3 Integrating sources

MLA-4 Documenting sources

MLA-5 Manuscript format; sample paper

APA and CMS Papers

(Coverage parallels MLA’s)

APA-1

APA-2

APA-3

APA-4

APA-5

CMS -1

CMS -2

CMS -3

CMS -4

CMS -5

INDEX