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.

Offering a model for thinking about response as a dialogue between students and teachers, Responding to Student Writers is a brief instructor resource which gets you thinking about the benefits of responding to writers and their writing.

THIS TITLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE 2016 MLA UPDATES! Our editorial team has updated this text based on content from The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition. Browse our catalog or contact your representative for a full listing of updated titles and packages, or to request a custom ISBN. For success in college, no skill is more critical than writing; it’s the very core of a student’s academic experience. Tested and trusted, A Writer’s Reference is an essential tool for students who are strengthening habits and skills that will support them throughout college. In an April 2014 survey of first-year writers, 75 percent reported that using a Hacker handbook made them a more confident academic writer. What’s more, A Writer’s Reference has been a powerful tool for change across college campuses—helping to create a culture of writing at many schools by supporting a common language for talking about academic writing. In that way, A Writer’s Reference is uniquely positioned to help transform attitudes about the value of writing instruction and the role that writing plays in academic work and in higher learning. With this eighth edition of the handbook, author Nancy Sommers invites you to be part of a community of those who teach and assign writing; who believe that critical reading, analytical writing, responsible research, and clarity are at the center of effective writing across the academy; and who use the nation’s best-selling and most responsive handbook to support the development of the college writer.

A Writer's Reference, the most widely adopted handbook in the United States, continues to be groundbreaking in its simplicity, offering the right content in an accessible format. New coauthor Nancy Sommers's own research, campus travel, and classroom experience keep the handbook in tune with the needs of academic writers. In a trusted quick-reference format, the seventh edition delivers advice on all the right topics: working with sources, revising with comments, preparing a portfolio, and more. A Writer's Reference offers unprecedented flexibility with several versions to choose from — a handbook that's truly at your service. Read the preface.

Click here to find out more about the 2009 MLA Updates and the 2010 APA Updates. Rules for Writers succeeds because it has always been grounded in classroom experience. By looking at her own students’ needs, Diana Hacker created an affordable and practical classroom tool that doubles as a quick reference. Developed with the help of instructors from two- and four-year schools, the sixth edition gives students quick access to the information they need to solve writing problems in any college course. In the Hacker tradition, the new contributing authors — Nancy Sommers, Tom Jehn, Jane Rosenzweig, and Marcy Carbajal Van Horn — have crafted solutions for the writing problems of today’s college students. Together they give us a new edition that provides more help with academic writing and research and one that works better for a wider range of multilingual students. Flexible content options — in print and online — allow students to get more than they pay for.

Writing about Literature is a practical guide to interpreting works of literature and to planning, composing, and documenting papers about literature. Students will find help with forming and supporting an interpretation, avoiding plot summary, integrating quotations from a literary work, observing the conventions of literature papers, and using secondary sources. Writing about Literature also includes two sample student essays — one that uses only a primary source and one that uses primary and secondary sources.

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.

When students routinely use their handbook in the course, they see its value, find that it’s a faster way to get answers than search engines like Google, learn to rely on it as a reference, and are more likely to achieve the goals of the course. And when that handbook is Rules for Writers, you can be sure the advice they find is practical and reliable—with help for composing and revising, writing arguments, analyzing texts, using grammar and punctuation correctly, and working with sources. In revising the eighth edition, Nancy Sommers has woven a new emphasis on reading critically throughout the first section of the handbook, introduced advice for analyzing multimodal texts, and added help for public speaking. New practical Writing Guides support students working through college assignments in a variety of genres. And new peer review advice helps students effectively comment on drafts and apply feedback to revisions of their own work. All of these improvements help student writers—but they also save you time and effort. You can draw from Rules for Writers for planning class discussions, conducting in-class workshops, and providing feedback on student work that they can easily apply. Rules for Writers even comes with a complete instructor’s manual, Teaching with Hacker Handbooks, with stepped-out lesson plans to customize and sample assignments, syllabi, and rubrics from your peers. This easy-to-navigate tabbed version of Rules for Writers includes an additional section with instruction on how to write about literature.

THIS TITLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE 2016 MLA UPDATES! Our editorial team has updated this text based on content from The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition. Browse our catalog or contact your representative for a full listing of updated titles and packages, or to request a custom ISBN. For success in college, no skill is more critical than writing; it’s the very core of a student’s academic experience. Tested and trusted, A Canadian Writer’s Reference is an essential tool for students who are strengthening habits and skills that will support them throughout college. Adapted from the most widely used college handbook ever published—and with the help of several Canadian instructors — A Canadian Writer's Reference has advice that's easy to find and easy to understand. Grounded in Canadian texts, culture, and current events, examples throughout the book provide relevant context and advice for Canadian writers. And a new instructor's edition offers classroom activities and teaching tips for Canadian instructors—making it easier than ever to integrate the handbook into the course.

When it comes to value, Rules rulesRules for Writers is a college writer’s companion that covers writing, grammar, research, and documentation in an extremely affordable and portable spiral-bound format. From the best-selling family of handbooks, Rules has consistently been the best value for college writers. Now it’s even more so. The Seventh Edition actually teaches students how to make better use of their handbook. With new material about how to integrate the handbook into lessons and class activities, Rules for Writers is an even more useful tool for instructors “We like Rules because it’s affordable, easy to use, and flexible enough for multiple courses.” — Anne Helms, Alamance Community College