Features

New to This Edition

A new how-to approach offers step-by-step instruction that will help students apply writing advice in practical ways and transfer skills to many different kinds of writing assignments. Fourteen new boxes offer the straightforward help that instructors and students want—how to go beyond a Google search, how to write better peer review comments, and more.

New Writer’s choice boxes on grammar and style offer opportunities for students to practice critical thinking at the sentence level. A new rhetorical approach emphasizes decision making (between first or third person, between active and passive voice, and so on) based on a writer’s purpose and audience. This approach gives instructors flexibility—a way to individualize instruction for students who may need more than a conventional explanation of the rules.

New ways to navigate bring students to key content quickly. Common student questions about writing, written in plain language, appear on each tab and help students find answers to questions such as How do I separate a source’s ideas from my own? and What can I do if my writing is too wordy? Useful chapter previews direct students to specific help within the writing and research chapters.

More help for research writers equips students in composition and across the disciplines with up-to-date citation guidelines—including MLA 2016 and Chicago 2017 guidelines—and formatting help. The ninth edition includes ample instruction in conducting responsible research, the foundation of academic work, and features a new APA-style paper.

LaunchPad: A digital companion that engages in new ways and offers new teaching material. LaunchPad for A Writer’s Reference combines an interactive e-book, engaging tutorial content, and innovative practice and assessment tools in a fully customizable course space. LaunchPad allows you to mix our resources with yours, assign easily, and save yourself time.

• A new e-book, still easy to assign, now has embedded video content and tools that allow students to personalize the handbook (highlighting/note taking)
• New video tutorials for writing and citation help students with difficult academic concepts. 24 new tutorials combine engaging video with scorable practice items to help with argument writing, analytical writing, annotated bibliography, and MLA and APA style.
• LearningCurve adaptive quizzing—along with more than 300 additional exercise items and writing prompts—offer plenty of grammar, research, and writing practice, all of which reports to a convenient gradebook.
• Video tools make it easy to integrate open-source content (videos from YouTube and other sources) into your LaunchPad course and allow you to build scorable, trackable response assignments around that content. The video tools allow your class to engage in online discussions about the material, fostering a social environment.

Your handbook, your way. With Curriculum Solutions, customizing your handbook is easy.

• ForeWords for English. With pre-built content chapters (12–16 pages each) on a variety of topics, you can create the handbook that meets the needs of you and your students. Choose from more than a dozen modules on writing proposals, time management, CSE style, business writing, using sentence templates for academic writing, and more.
• Make it your own. You can further customize by adding brief original, school-specific content such as goals of the writing program, location and hours of the writing center, common syllabus/assignments, and so on.
  
  
• Add a tab. Or two. You can further customize by adding specific tabs to A Writer’s Reference, namely Writing in the Disciplines, Strategies for Online Learners, Resources for Multilingual Writers and ESL, Understanding and Composing Multimodal Projects.