It lives where students live—online. Writer's Help is designed for students who spend a lot of time online; it's where they socialize, communicate, attend college classes, and turn for help and for answers. Students will use a handbook that takes advantage of the medium. Because it sits side-by-side with other applications in a student's workspace, finding and applying advice is easy.
It gets what student writers are saying, no matter how they say it. Writer's Help allows students to search using nonexpert terms like flow, point, or getting unstuck and gives reliable results even when students aren't familiar with composition terminology. It also responds with useful results to broad search terms like research and to common teacher comments like need more details.
It reflects real research with real college writers. Writer's Help is both revolutionary and relevant because it's based on research with 1,600 college writers from across the country. Online surveys, face-to-face on-campus interviews, beta testing, and formal usability testing helped us to tune in to how college writers describe their writing problems, what terms they use when they search for help, how they navigate online tools, and what they need their handbook to provide. An expert in information design, coauthor Stephen Bernhardt led the research into how students search for writing help and then rethought how handbook content should work.
It gives trusted Hacker advice. Based on the most widely used writing advice on the market, Writer's Help includes signature Hacker explanations and examples—reworked for an online presentation. Users who are familiar with the Hacker family will recognize the consistent and friendly tone, direct approach, and examples that teach. The handbook is informed by the current work of teacher-scholar Nancy Sommers, who has been investigating the challenges students face in academic writing situations and the skills students need to meet those challenges.
It lets users make it their own. Writer's Help enables students and instructors to use their own words to tag and share useful content, save searches, and share links that automatically open in the handbook. Users can personalize both the search and the content. What's more, Writer's Help is a quick reference that's also a snap to assign.