A new coauthor who’s both a teacher and a scholar. Nancy Sommers brings three decades of classroom experience and research into student writing to the Hacker handbook franchise. With expertise on how student writers compose and revise, how they develop as writers throughout their college years, and how they interpret and respond to feedback, she continues the tradition of paying close attention to students’ needs.
A revision based on research with students and teachers across the country. We spent more than a year asking college writers and teachers of writing about how to strengthen the handbook, and we took their advice. Nancy Sommers conducted faculty workshops at more than 35 colleges and universities and interviewed 65 student writers about feedback, revision, and how to make the most of handbook advice. Nearly one hundred instructors reviewed new material and made valuable suggestions. And the editors of the
Handbook translated hundreds of e-mail messages from college writers and instructors into useful help in the eighth edition.
Navigation that helps students make the most of their handbook. - New Making the most of your handbook boxes help students pull together the advice they need from different parts of the book to complete a variety of writing assignments.
- New student-friendly terms complement traditional handbook section titles. Terms like main idea, flow, representing the other side, placed in the upper right-hand corners of each page, help students find advice using language they recognize.
Academic writing and research coverage that’s targeted and current. - New coverage of synthesis helps writers understand sources, put sources in a conversation, and then figure out what new angle they bring to that conversation. The eighth edition provides new illustrated examples in MLA and APA style.
- A new research case study shows how to work with sources. The MLA coverage now features a close look at one student’s research and writing process and provides an illustrated tutorial on strategizing, using search tools and techniques, evaluating sources, and thinking critically about how best to use sources in a paper.
- More than 85 new documentation models, many annotated, help students cite sources in all three styles (MLA, APA, and Chicago) — with special attention to new types of sources like podcasts, online videos, blogs, and digital archives.
Concrete strategies that help students revise. - Based on Nancy Sommers’s research with students at two- and four-year schools, a new boxed feature, Revising with Comments, helps students understand teachers’ feedback and gives students concrete strategies for revising in response to comments on their drafts — comments like "narrow your introduction" and "be specific."
- A new stepped-out process for revising thesis statements helps students identify a problem in a draft thesis, ask relevant questions, and then revise.
More support for ESL and multilingual writers. A completely revised Part VI, Challenges for ESL and Multilingual Writers, developed with the help of an ESL expert, offers more accessible advice and more support for multilingual writers across the disciplines. The handbook’s companion Web site also features rough and revised versions of a paper written by a student in an ESL composition course.
Teaching with Hacker Handbooks, by Marcy Carbajal Van Horn, responds to the question, How can I integrate a handbook into my composition course? Designed to accompany all four Hacker handbooks, it supports both novice and seasoned instructors with discussions of common writing classroom challenges, a collection of lesson plans and samples that are ready to use or to customize, and a series of cross-references to a wide variety of print and online ancillaries.
More digital choices start at The Bedford Handbook Student Center, bedfordstmartins.com/bedhandbook. In one convenient place, you’ll find free and open content — from interactive exercises to model student papers — as well as our innovative premium media. Do more and pay less with the e-book. Explore
Re:Writing Plus, our collection of premium media such as
Video Central, with over 50 brief videos about writing. But if you want it all, along with assignment and assessment tools, check out
CompClass for The Bedford Handbook at yourcompclass.com.