Synopses & Reviews
The easiest handbook to use.
A Writer's Reference was the first handbook to use tabbed dividers for quick reference, a comb binding that allows the book to stay open, and an easy-to-use menu system. Color-coded menus and documentation sections direct students quickly to the content they need. A user-friendly index enables them to find answers to their questions without a prior mastery of grammatical terminology.
The easiest handbook to understand. Diana Hacker's clear, concise writing style and friendly, unpretentious tone make the book accessible to students with a range of abilities a reference they can easily use on their own. The clean, uncluttered page design simplifies complicated material and highlights the most important information. And hand-edited sentences let students see both an error and its correction at a glance.
A comprehensive writing guide. A Writer's Reference is a writing tool students can use throughout college and well into their professional careers, providing crucial but concise advice on composing and revising, grammar and mechanics, research and documentation, as well as print and electronic document design. Four sample papers illustrating three documentation styles demonstrate effective argument, style, and page format.
A comprehensive research guide. The research guide consists of three tabbed sections: Researching, MLA papers, and APA and CMS (Chicago) papers. The section on researching, illustrated with cross-curricular examples, focuses on finding and evaluating both print and online sources. The MLA, APA, and CMS sections offer parallel treatment of forming a thesis, avoiding plagiarism, and integrating sources along with comprehensive coverage of documentation and formatting. Examples for each style are appropriate to the discipline.
A handbook for the digital age. A Diana Hacker innovation, grammar checker boxes throughout the handbook protect writers from unintentional blunders that easily result from an uninformed use of electronic editing tools. Thorough guidance for Web researchers shows them not just how to find promising results but how to evaluate these with care. Diana Hacker's advice on document design upholds timeless principles of clarity and professionalism while keeping pace with technology's impact on how today's students and professionals produce, present, and distribute texts. Fully and clearly integrated with the handbook, an expanded companion Web site makes A Writer's Reference a more usable and thorough resource than ever before.
Help for culturally diverse students. The first handbook author to offer such help, Diana Hacker provides clear and simple advice for nonnative speakers, including a separate ESL section and boxed tips throughout the book.
Synopsis
A proven success. The best-selling college textbook of any kind. Thoroughly class tested and enthusiastically endorsed by millions of students and their instructors at more than 1300 colleges and universities across the country.
About the Author
Diana Hacker's handbooks, used at almost half of the colleges and universities in the country are the most widely-adopted in America. A member of the English faculty at Prince George's Community College in Maryland for more than 30 years, Diana Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students. Diana Hacker's other handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin's, include The Bedford Handbook, Sixth Edition (2002), Rules for Writers, Fifth Edition (2004) and A Pocket Style Manual, Fourth Edition (2004).