UPDATED SUMMER 2024

A Writer's Reference

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Product Overview

Authors

Diana Hacker

Diana Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students over thirty-five years at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, where she was a member of the English faculty. Hacker handbooks, built on innovation and on a keen understanding of the challenges facing student writers, are the most widely adopted in America. Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, include A Writer’s Reference, Eleventh Edition (2025); A Pocket Style Manual, Tenth Edition (2025); The Bedford Handbook, Twelfth Edition (2023); Rules for Writers, Tenth Edition (2022); and Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version.

Nancy Sommers

Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles “Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers” and “Responding to Student Writing” are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition. Recently she has been exploring different audiences through publishing in popular media. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and editor of Tiny Teaching Stories on Macmillan Learning’s Bits Blog.

C | Composing and Revising
C1 Planning
C2 Drafting
C3 Writing paragraphs
C4 Reviewing, revising, and editing
C5 Preparing a portfolio; reflecting on your writing
A | Academic Reading, Writing, and Speaking
A1 Reading and writing critically
A2 Reading and writing about multimodal texts
A3 Reading arguments
A4 Writing arguments
A5 Speaking confidently
A6 Writing in the disciplines
R | Researched writing
R1 Thinking like a researcher; gathering sources
R2 Managing information; taking notes responsibly
R3 Evaluating sources
MLA | MLA Style
MLA-1 Supporting a thesis
MLA-2 Citing sources; avoiding plagiarism
MLA-3 Integrating sources
MLA-4 Documenting sources
MLA-5 Format and sample research essay
APA CMS | APA Style and CMS Style
APA-1 Supporting a thesis
APA-2 Citing sources; avoiding plagiarism
APA-3 Integrating sources
APA-4 Documenting sources
APA-5 Format and sample research essay
CMS-1 Supporting a thesis
CMS-2 Citing sources; avoiding plagiarism
CMS-3 Integrating sources
CMS-4 Documenting sources
CMS-5 Format and sample research essay
S | Sentence Style
S1 Parallelism
S2 Needed words
S3 Problems with modifiers
S4 Shifts
S5 Mixed constructions
S6 Sentence emphasis
S7 Sentence variety
W | Word choice
W1 Glossary of usage
W2 Wordy sentences
W3 Active verbs
W4 Appropriate language
W5 Exact language
G | Grammatical sentences
G1 Subject-verb agreement
G2 Verb form, tenses, and moods
G3 Pronouns
G4 Adjectives and adverbs
G5 Sentence fragments
G6 Run-on sentences
M | Multilingual Writers and ESL topics
M1 Verbs
M2 Articles
M3 Sentence structure
M4 Using adjectives
M5 Prepositions and idiomatic expressions
M6 Paraphrasing sources effectively
P | Punctuation and Mechanics
P1 The comma
P2 Unnecessary commas
P3 The semicolon and the colon
P4 The apostrophe
P5 Quotation marks
P6 Other punctuation marks
P7 Spelling and hyphenation
P8 Capitalization
P9 Abbreviations and numbers
P10 Italics
B | Basic Grammar
B1 Parts of speech
B2 Sentence patterns
B3 Subordinate word groups
B4 Sentence types
I | Index
[[only for WAL edition]]
L | Writing about Literature
L1 Reading to form an interpretation
L2 Planning the paper
L3 Writing the paper
L4 Observing conventions
L5 Integrating quotations from the text
L6 Using secondary sources
L7 Sample papers

Product Updates

Summer 2024 Updates:

New! Exclusive Hacker/Sommers Content: AI Guides for Instructors and Students.
Boost AI literacy with Generative AI and College Writing, a brief resource by Nancy Sommers that helps college writers understand the opportunities and challenges of AI use in academic settings. Separate instructor and student guides offer support for using AI ethically and responsibly, with assessment to help reinforce concepts. Now available in the Achieve courses for A Writer’s Reference, Rules for Writers, A Pocket Style Manual, The Bedford Handbook, and Achieve-Writer’s Help-Hacker.

Tenth Edition Updates (2021):

Achieve--a new digital composition space designed for engagement. Co-designed with composition instructors and students from across the country, Achieve is an exciting, new, and comprehensive set of interconnected teaching and assessment tools. It offers new ways to engage students and to assign and facilitate writing, reflection, and peer review.

Writing tools keep writing and revising at the center of your course. Draft Goals focus students, feedback tools help you target problems, reflection prompts increase rhetorical awareness, and the Revision Plan makes feedback actionable.
Pre-built assignments make your life easier. Each one can be assigned as-is or customized: analysis, argument, annotated bibliography, narrative, reflection, and research.
An interactive e-book version of A Writer’s Reference, built in to Achieve, brings together the resources students need to prepare for class. Students can download the e-book to read offline or to have read aloud to them.
Built-in Source Check plagiarism prevention software guides students as they learn to be responsible academic researchers.
Diagnostics and individualized study plans give students ownership of their learning process.
Powerful trends, insights, and reports for each assignment inform your teaching and feedback and help you visualize and measure students’ progress.
For corequisite composition courses, Achieve lets students sign in to their composition and corequisite sections with one easy process–and no additional fees.

Reorganized for academic writers. To make using A Writer’s Reference easier than ever, we’ve clustered all of the material critical to the composition course and essential for the most common assignments up front: coverage of the writing process, critical reading, argument and analysis — and now research and documentation. The first half of the book becomes a robust how-to guide, and the second half of the book functions as a quick reference for style, grammar, and punctuation topics designed for writers with a wide variety of experience with English.
More help with paraphrasing and fact checking. The new edition includes stronger help for working with sources. A new how-to guide gives students a writing process for paraphrasing original material, along with a concrete example to follow. New advice for detecting false and misleading sources encourages students to ask critical questions about the news, data, and other information they encounter as part of an academic or everyday writing task.
New “Note to self” feature that encourages good writers’ habits. Aligned with the pedagogy of Achieve, the handbook helps students with reflection and revision planning. A new boxed feature models the kind of thinking and planning that successful writers do as they move from assignment to draft or from one draft to another. Both Achieve and the handbook foster the active and personalized learning that research shows leads to greater success rates for a wide variety of students.
A more engaging visual approach. For students who respond to information presented visually, we offer new visuals to complement the written instruction in sections that cover working with sources, testing assumptions, writing conclusions, integrating sources, and understanding the rhetorical situation.
A new resource for corequisite composition. For students enrolled in paired, corequisite, or ALP sections of composition, A Student’s Companion to Hacker Handbooks offers practical support that will help them get up to speed and perform on-level. The resource, available in print or in Achieve, includes more than 60 exercises for grammar, research, and writing; graphic organizers for many types of essays and paragraphs; substantial support for college reading; numerous reflection activities; outline templates; and more.

Authors

Diana Hacker

Diana Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students over thirty-five years at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, where she was a member of the English faculty. Hacker handbooks, built on innovation and on a keen understanding of the challenges facing student writers, are the most widely adopted in America. Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, include A Writer’s Reference, Eleventh Edition (2025); A Pocket Style Manual, Tenth Edition (2025); The Bedford Handbook, Twelfth Edition (2023); Rules for Writers, Tenth Edition (2022); and Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version.

Nancy Sommers

Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles “Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers” and “Responding to Student Writing” are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition. Recently she has been exploring different audiences through publishing in popular media. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and editor of Tiny Teaching Stories on Macmillan Learning’s Bits Blog.

Product Updates

Summer 2024 Updates:

Tenth Edition Updates (2021):

Achieve--a new digital composition space designed for engagement. Co-designed with composition instructors and students from across the country, Achieve is an exciting, new, and comprehensive set of interconnected teaching and assessment tools. It offers new ways to engage students and to assign and facilitate writing, reflection, and peer review.

Writing tools keep writing and revising at the center of your course. Draft Goals focus students, feedback tools help you target problems, reflection prompts increase rhetorical awareness, and the Revision Plan makes feedback actionable.
Pre-built assignments make your life easier. Each one can be assigned as-is or customized: analysis, argument, annotated bibliography, narrative, reflection, and research.
An interactive e-book version of A Writer’s Reference, built in to Achieve, brings together the resources students need to prepare for class. Students can download the e-book to read offline or to have read aloud to them.
Built-in Source Check plagiarism prevention software guides students as they learn to be responsible academic researchers.
Diagnostics and individualized study plans give students ownership of their learning process.
Powerful trends, insights, and reports for each assignment inform your teaching and feedback and help you visualize and measure students’ progress.
For corequisite composition courses, Achieve lets students sign in to their composition and corequisite sections with one easy process–and no additional fees.

Reorganized for academic writers. To make using A Writer’s Reference easier than ever, we’ve clustered all of the material critical to the composition course and essential for the most common assignments up front: coverage of the writing process, critical reading, argument and analysis — and now research and documentation. The first half of the book becomes a robust how-to guide, and the second half of the book functions as a quick reference for style, grammar, and punctuation topics designed for writers with a wide variety of experience with English.
More help with paraphrasing and fact checking. The new edition includes stronger help for working with sources. A new how-to guide gives students a writing process for paraphrasing original material, along with a concrete example to follow. New advice for detecting false and misleading sources encourages students to ask critical questions about the news, data, and other information they encounter as part of an academic or everyday writing task.
New “Note to self” feature that encourages good writers’ habits. Aligned with the pedagogy of Achieve, the handbook helps students with reflection and revision planning. A new boxed feature models the kind of thinking and planning that successful writers do as they move from assignment to draft or from one draft to another. Both Achieve and the handbook foster the active and personalized learning that research shows leads to greater success rates for a wide variety of students.
A more engaging visual approach. For students who respond to information presented visually, we offer new visuals to complement the written instruction in sections that cover working with sources, testing assumptions, writing conclusions, integrating sources, and understanding the rhetorical situation.
A new resource for corequisite composition. For students enrolled in paired, corequisite, or ALP sections of composition, A Student’s Companion to Hacker Handbooks offers practical support that will help them get up to speed and perform on-level. The resource, available in print or in Achieve, includes more than 60 exercises for grammar, research, and writing; graphic organizers for many types of essays and paragraphs; substantial support for college reading; numerous reflection activities; outline templates; and more.

Helping college writers achieve more. As always.

A Writer’s Reference has offered clear and quick answers to tough questions for millions of college writers. With a groundbreaking tabbed, lay-flat format and a first-of-its-kind directness, it helped a generation of students engage in their own writing and meet the challenges of the composition course. As we celebrate the 10th edition, we invite you to see our latest innovation--our latest answer to the question we have been asking for 35 years: How can we help? We help with superior content developed by experienced authors and shaped by faculty and student advisers. And we help with Achieve, a first-of-its-kind suite of digital tools that facilitate revision, reflection, and peer review and personalizes student progress paired with content you trust.

Success Stories

Here are a few examples of how Achieve has helped instructors like you improve student preparedness, enhance their sense of belonging, and achieve course goals they set for themselves.

Prof. Kiandra Johnson, Spelman College

See how the resources in Achieve help you engage students before, during, and after class.

Prof. Jennifer Duncan

Use diagnostics in Achieve for a snapshot into cognitive and non-cognitive factors that may impact your students’ preparedness.

Prof. Ryan Elsenpeter

Here’s why educators who use Achieve would recommend it to their peers.

Related Titles

A Writer's Reference with Exercises

Diana Hacker; Nancy Sommers

A Writer's Reference with Writing about Literature

Diana Hacker; Nancy Sommers

A Student's Companion to Hacker Handbooks

Bedford/St. Martin's

Teaching with Hacker Handbooks (Online Only)

Diana Hacker; Marcy Carbajal Van Horn; Jonathan S. Cullick; Sara McCurry

A Writer's Reference with 2021 MLA Update

Diana Hacker; Nancy Sommers

Looking for instructor resources like Test Banks, Lecture Slides, and Clicker Questions? Request access to Achieve to explore the full suite of instructor resources.