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.