A Pocket Style Manual with Exercises, with 2021 MLA Update

Ninth Edition

Publication Date: October 01, 2022

Spiral-Bound ISBN: 9781319503277

Pages: 384

Writing help at a glance.

A Pocket Style Manual with Exercises provides practical advice for any level of college writing. Straightforward instruction on grammar, style, and punctuation gives students quick answers to their writing questions. Step-by-step guides and a how-to approach to research writing help students

Spiral-Bound

Keep your book open while you write with spiral-bound texts.

Spiral-Bound

ISBN: 9781319503277
A Pocket Style Manual with Exercises, with 2021 MLA Update

COMING SOON

£34.99

Clarity
1 Tighten wordy sentences.
2 Prefer active verbs.
3 Balance parallel ideas.
4 Add needed words.
5 Eliminate distracting shifts.
6 Untangle mixed constructions.
7 Repair misplaced and dangling modifiers.
8 Provide sentence variety.
9 Find an appropriate voice.

Grammar
10 Make subjects and verbs agree.
11 Be alert to other problems with verbs.
12 Use pronouns with care.
13 Use adjectives and adverbs appropriately.
14 Repair sentence fragments.
15 Revise run-on sentences.
16 Consider grammar topics for multilingual writers.

Punctuation
17 The comma
18 The semicolon and the colon
19 The apostrophe
20 Quotation marks
21 Other punctuation marks
Mechanics
22 Capitalization
23 Abbreviations, numbers, and italics
24 Hyphenation
Research
25 Posing a research question
26 Finding appropriate sources
27 Managing information; avoiding plagiarism
28 Evaluating sources

MLA Papers
29 Supporting a thesis
30 Avoiding plagiarism
31 Integrating sources
32 Integrating literary quotations
33 MLA documentation style
34 MLA format; sample research paper

APA Papers
35 Supporting a thesis
36 Avoiding plagiarism
37 Integrating sources
38 APA documentation style
39 APA format; sample research paper

Chicago Papers
40 Supporting a thesis
41 Avoiding plagiarism
42 Integrating sources
43 Chicago documentation style
44 Chicago format; sample pages

CSE Papers
45 CSE documentation style
46 CSE format

Exercises

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.

Ninth Edition Updates (2021):

Achieve with A Pocket Style Manual puts student writing and revision at the core of your course, with a dedicated composition space that guides students through drafting, peer review, source check, reflection, and revision. Developed to support best practices in commenting on student drafts, Achieve is a flexible, integrated suite of tools for designing and facilitating writing assignments, paired with actionable insights that make students’ progress towards outcomes clear and measurable. Fully editable pre-built assignments support the book’s approach, and an e-book is included.

“At a glance” pages point students to quick help on everything from prepositions to signal phrases.

New guides to research writing, with topics including integrating quotations and detecting false or misleading sources, advise students on working with sources.

55 exercises provide additional practice for style, grammar, punctuation, and mechanics.

“A Pocket Style Manual is for the student what a multi-function pocket knife is to the survivalist—a compact, versatile, and practical tool. It’s the one textbook a student can rely on for their college career.”
-Rick Garza, Reedley College

“This is the most useful handbook I have used in thirty years of teaching. It provides the information students need without overwhelming them. It is easy on the pocketbook as well.”
-Pam Stone, North Arkansas College

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.