Hacker, Diane : Prince George Community College-Maryland

With almost half of the colleges and universities in the country currently using one or more of her handbooks, DIANA HACKER is the most successful textbook author in college publishing history. A member of the English faculty at Prince George's Community College in Maryland for more than 25 years, Diana Hacker has personally class-tested her handbooks in hundreds of first-year writing classes. Diana Hacker's other handbooks include Rules for Writers, Fourth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000); A Writer's Reference, Fourth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999); and A Pocket Style Manual, Third Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.)

Clear, concise writing style and friendly, unpretentious tone. More than a million students have come to rely on easy-to-understand explanations that come directly from the author's own classroom experience. Diana Hacker explains concepts intelligently but briefly, allowing students to find answers faster than they do with other handbooks.

An indispensable reference text. Trademark reference features such as hand-edited sentences, tutorials demonstrating how to use the book, a simplified brief menu inside the front cover, and a user-friendly index, with entries such as I vs. me, help students find the information they need -- and then understand what they find. And The Bedford Handbook's award-winning design, with full color and lively icons, makes the pages easy to scan.

A thorough classroom text. The Bedford Handbook includes all the topics covered in a composition course, from composing and revising to grammar and mechanics to research and documentation. Nine sample papers illustrate effective writing and document design. Hundreds of exercises, some with answers, allow students to test themselves.

Innovative charts and boxes. In addition to providing the charts you expect to find in a handbook, Diana Hacker has designed several flow charts for important topics such as subject-verb agreement and run-on sentences. She has also written 20 Looking at Yourself as a Writer charts, which encourage self-reflection, and 50 grammar checker boxes, which show students what current grammar checkers can -- and cannot -- do.

Help for culturally diverse students. The first handbook author to include such help, Diana Hacker offers clear and simple advice for nonnative speakers in a separate ESL section as well as in boxed tips throughout the book.

PART I. THE WRITING PROCESS
1.Generate Ideas and Sketch a Plan
2.Rough Out an Initial Draft
3.Make Global Revisions; Then Revise Sentences
4.Build Effective Paragraphs

PART II. DOCUMENT DESIGN
5. Become Familiar with the Principles of Document Design
6. Use Standard Academic and Business Formats
7. Create Effective Electronic Documents

PART III. CLEAR SENTENCES
8.Prefer Active Verbs
9. Balance Parallel Ideas
10. Add Needed Words
11. Untangle Mixed Constructions
12. Repair Misplaced and Dangling Modifiers
13. Eliminate Distracting Shifts
14. Emphasize Key Ideas
15. Provide Some Variety

PART IV. WORD CHOICE
16. Tighten Wordy Sentences
17. Choose Appropriate Language
18. Find the Exact Words

PART V. GRAMMATICAL SENTENCES
19. Repair Sentence Fragments
20. Revise Run-On Sentences
21. Make Subjects and Verbs Agree
22. Make Pronouns and Antecedents Agree
23. Make Pronoun References Clear
24. Distinguish Between Pronouns Such as I and Me
25. Distinguish Between Who and Whom
26. Choose Adjectives and Adverbs with Care
27. Choose Standard English Verb Forms
28. Use Verbs in the Appropriate Tense and Mood

PART VI. ESL TROUBLE SPOTS
29. Be Alert to Special Problems With Verbs
30. Use the Articles A, An, and The Appropriately
31. Be Aware of Other Potential Trouble Spots

PART VII. PUNCTUATION
32. The Comma
33. Unnecessary Commas
34. The Semicolon
35. The Colon
36. The Apostrophe
37. Quotation Marks
38. End Punctuation
39. Other Punctuation Marks: the Dash, Parentheses, Brackets, the Ellipsis Mark, the Slash

PART VIII. MECHANICS
40. Abbreviations
41. Numbers
42. Italics (Underlining)
43. Spelling
44. The Hyphen
45. Capital Letters

PART IX. CRITICAL THINKING
46. Writing about Texts
47. Constructing Arguments
48. Evaluating Arguments

PART X. RESEARCHED WRITING
49. Conducting Research
50. Evaluating Sources
51. Managing Information: Avoiding Plagiarism
52. Choosing a Documentation Style
53. Supporting a Thesis
54. Citing Sources: Avoiding Plagiarism
55. Integrating Information from Sources
56. MLA Documentation Style
57. MLA Manuscript Format: Sample MLA Paper
58. Writing about Literature
59. APA Papers
60. Chicago Papers

PART XI. GRAMMAR BASICS
61. Parts of Speech
62. Sentence Patterns
63.Subordinate Word Groups
64. Sentence Types