A Writer's Reference with Exercises

Tenth Edition

Publication Date: February 15, 2021

Comb-Bound ISBN: 9781319191887

Pages: 624

Helping college writers achieve more. As always.

A Writer’s Reference with Exercises 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...

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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

Superior content that’s authoritative and trustworthy. With the tenth edition of A Writer’s Reference with Exercises, students have content written by widely respected authors and class-tested by hundreds of thousands of students and instructors. Users who loved the writing guides and how-to pages in the ninth edition will be pleased to know they are still here in the tenth — as are the engaging writing videos that help with argument, analysis, and annotated bibliography.

Covers all the topics for composition. A Writer’s Reference with Exercises supports students as they compose for different purposes and audiences and in a variety of genres and as they collaborate, revise deeply, conduct research, document sources, format their writing, and edit for clarity. Neither Google nor an OWL can give students the confidence that comes with a coherent reference that covers all the topics they need in a writing course.

Easy to use. Edition after edition, users praise the clean and open design that lets students breathe. Students themselves say the book is "not intimidating" and "not overwhelming." The emphasis on clear, direct advice, examples that teach, and useful navigation means students find solutions to writing problems quickly--and easily understand and apply what they find.

Unparalleled service and support. Bedford/St. Martin’s has been in the field of composition with you for more than thirty-five years. We provide professional resources, professional development workshops, training for digital tools, consultation about tailoring your materials, and quick, personal service when you need it.

Available in multiple versions to suit your needs. Choose from a classic 12-tabbed reference book, a version with integrated exercises, and a version with help for writing about literature. A custom version is also an appealing option (enrollment minimums apply).

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.

Reorganized for academic writers. To make using A Writer’s Reference with Exercises 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.

“A Writer’s Reference is the premier writing handbook--a hallmark for our discipline.”
— C. Cole Osborne, Guilford Technical Community College

“A Writer’s Reference is the only textbook that every single faculty member agrees on.”
— Kristin Redfield, Forsyth Technical Community College

“This book is an invaluable resource, but more than that, it is a critical voice in the larger conversation about the shifting landscape of rhetoric, composition, and the lives of all learners.”
— Kathleen Adams, Appalachian State University

“The new visuals make me excited about their potential as teaching tools. The new visual approach will help students stay engaged, retain information, and recall information.”
— Bridgette Weir, Nashville State Community College

“Students can achieve their own writing growth and their own writing success with the right tool. Achieve is that tool.” — Jennifer Duncan, Georgia State University, Perimeter College

“Achieve presents a new way for students not only to receive feedback but to act on it.”
— Joel Wilson, Keiser University and Community College of Allegheny County

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.