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Below are a few of our featured custom projects that we’ve created in collaboration with schools across the country. For a complete list of schools we've worked with recently, click here.

Kennesaw State University

Custom Public Speaking Textbook

The Communication Department at Kennesaw State University used A Speaker's Guidebook, Third Edition, along with a photocopied coursepack. Some instructors suggested students use A Speaker's Guidebook e-Book, and others encouraged students to take advantage of the resources available on the book's companion Web site.

The publication of the Fourth Edition of A Speaker's Guidebook was the occasion for the department to bring all these materials together. They revised the department course content into a 64-page introduction to Public Speaking at KSU and placed it in the textbook behind its own tab. Additionally, printed on that tab is an activation code that gives students access to the companion site and such premium resources as the e-book, the Bedford Speech Outliner, Video Quizzes, and the Relaxation Audio. Now students can purchase the single textbook rather than the book, the coursepack, the e-book, and the access code, and instructors can be confident that any materials they want students to use are immediately available to them.

New Mexico State University

Custom Handbook

New Mexico State University wanted a writing handbook that would work for not just a range of English Department courses—from Rhetoric and Composition to Writing in the Humanities and Social Sciences to Advanced Technical and Professional Communication—but for all NMSU courses.

With the flexible content available with A Writer's Reference, Sixth Edition, the school was able to create a custom handbook with precisely the coverage they were looking for. They placed Designing Documents and Understanding Visuals immediately following Academic Writing, and they added Writing in the Disciplines and Writing about Literature at the end of the book. Even without original content, the NMSU edition of A Writer's Reference is a truly customized resource.

University of California, San Diego

Custom History Reader

Eleanor Roosevelt College at UC San Diego offers an interdisciplinary sequence called "Making of the Modern World," which provides a global overview from the dawn of human history to the contemporary world.

The professor teaching "Making of the Modern World 4: New Ideas and Contact of Cultures (1200-1750)" wanted to use Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader, Third Edition, for his course, but he couldn't ask students to purchase a two-volume set for a one-quarter course. He could, however, create a single-volume custom reader containing seven chapters from Volume I and six chapters from Volume II. The book and the course cover precisely the same time period, and students have a compact reader that they will make full use of.

University of Central Florida

Custom Handbook and Web site

Although the Writing Program at UCF selected The Everyday Writer, Fourth Edition, as the handbook for ENC 1101 and 1102, the hope is that students will keep the handbook throughout their college careers.

The subtitle "A Handbook for All of Your Writing at the University of Central Florida" signals to students what they will find inside the book. In addition to information on the Writing Program, the Writing Center, the Library, and more, the school's custom section offers "Area- and Discipline-Specific Information about Writing," to which every department and program on campus contributed. The "Custom Web Site for Writing across the Disciplines" offers even more information about writing and researching at UCF and is updated regularly.

University of Washington

Custom Rhetoric-Reader

Acts of Inquiry is the second edition of the University of Washington's custom rhetoric-reader that introduces students to academic reading, research, and writing.

In this new edition, the book's sixteen text chapters are taken from four different Bedford/St. Martin's rhetorics, uniquely organized to support students in meeting the learning outcomes of the Expository Writing Program courses. Like the earlier book, Acts of Inquiry is available in two versions—one containing the text chapters only and the other with forty additional readings chosen by the editors to serve as models for student writing or objects for student analysis. In this way, the book is flexible enough to be used in four different courses in the Expository Writing Program.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Custom World Literature Anthology

When the University of Nevada, Las Vegas began considering new anthologies for English 232: World Literature II, they were immediately impressed with The Bedford Introduction to World Literature, Volume 2.

Having used a full world literature anthology previously, department members were delighted to find so many of the selections they assigned for the course in the single compact volume. Only a small number of "favorites" were missing, so we created a new custom section for the back of the book containing an original introduction written by the department and the twelve desired selections. The faculty now had a book containing every selection they needed, and the students had a more compact and affordable anthology than ever before.

Texas Tech

Adaptive Grammar Diagnostics

Texas Technical University has an on-going research project to assess grammar skills in various areas and analyze the scoring patterns of T.A.'s and students over the course of several semesters.

We created a custom site that provides access to the e-handbook and a suite of online materials, as well as the new Prep-U adaptive quizzing engine where students complete Texas Tech-authored diagnostic quizzes and receive personalized mastery levels within a set of grammar areas. Instructors generate reports to gauge class comprehension, and students work through exercises that programmatically match their individual levels.

Rio Hondo

Modules in an Online Course Space

Rio Hondo Community College needed a way to better measure student proficiency in the areas that serve as learning outcomes for a 3-credit English writing lab.

Our CompClass online course space provided the platform in which Rio Hondo could completely customize the design and aggregation of resources for each learning outcome. The faculty worked closely with our Director of New Media and editorial team to develop a unique set of modules for each of the four levels of the writing lab. And the course management functionality built into CompClass lets Rio Hondo see how its students are doing across the levels more easily.

Georgia Tech

Custom e-book

Georgia Tech's unique curriculum comprises areas that span several of our composition, public speaking, and technical communication textbooks.

Using our dynamic platform, we digitized and combined content from eight different sources into a single streamlined e-book, reworking the design and table of contents to match the Georgia Tech course outcomes, while retaining the note-taking, highlighting, and bookmarking functionality that our standard e-books share.

“Bedford/St. Martin’s new media team has a wealth of editorial, design, and technical expertise that makes them indispensible partners as we make decisions related to both design and content to support learning in our classes.”
—Andrew Cooper, Assistant Director Writing and Communication Program
at Georgia Tech