Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers with I-Book & 2003 MLA Update Package (7th Edition) [Hardcover]

Maxine Hairston (Author), John Ruszkiewicz (Author), Christy Friend (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0131234714 | ISBN-13: 978-0131234710 | Edition: 7

"What did you write today?" "What will you write tomorrow?" The Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers, Seventh Edition, is the only handbook proven to prepare you completely for writing in the classroom and beyond. Known for its accessible style and innovation, the new edition of The Scott Foresman Handbook continues the tradition with My Handbook. This groundbreaking service allows you to personalize the online edition of The Scott Foresman Handbook to meet your needs. In addition, it offers instant access to the entire Scott Foresman Handbook, diagnostic tests, interactive wercises, and more. Click on www.prenhall.com/hairston/, and use your access code packaged free with new copy purchase of The Scott Foresman Handbook, Seventh Edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"What did you write today?"
"What will you write tomorrow?"

The Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers, Seventh Edition, is the only handbook proven to prepare you completely for writing in the classroom and beyond. Known for its accessible style and innovation, the new edition of The Scott Foresman Handbook continues the tradition with My Handbook. This groundbreaking service allows you to personalize the online edition of The Scott Foresman Handbook to meet your needs. In addition, it offers instant access to the entire Scott Foresman Handbook, diagnostic tests, interactive wercises, and more. Click on www.prenhall.com/hairston/, and use your access code packaged free with new copy purchase of The Scott Foresman Handbook, Seventh Edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

If you are teaching first-year composition, you have a diverse classroom of students from ambitious chemistry majors or aspiring poets to budding entrepreneurs. Regardless of your students' interests, odds are that they'll write every day. Whatever their goals as writers, the seventh edition of The Scott Foresman Handbook will help your students achieve them. Do your students need step-by-step advice for surviving their first college research paper assignment? Instructions for crafting a Web page or a PowerPoint presentation? Tips on literary analysis for a senior thesis? Formatting guidelines for a business letter? They will find it all in this handbook.

Since the best-selling first edition, The Scott Foresman Handbook has proven again and again that a comprehensive handbook can be easy, practical, even fun to use. Each new edition has provided complete, up-to-date material on writing processes, argumentation, style, grammar, mechanics, and punctuation, in friendly and accessible language. Yet we've also broken new ground, anticipating developments in writing influenced by innovative theories and technologies. For example, earlier editions of this handbook have led the field in addressing document design, online research, service learning, and other emerging trends. As a result of our forward-looking philosophy, writers using The Scott Foresman Handbook know what college writing means today and what it will mean tomorrow.

What's New

This seventh edition continues our commitment to preparing students for college writing as well as writing beyond college. In keeping with this goal, we have added new material that writers need for today, and we have expanded and updated familiar sections. Here are the highlights:

• More on Visual and Multimedia Literacy. The Scott Foresman Handbook was the first handbook acknowledging that college writers now produce many different kinds of documents in a variety of media including visual and aural "texts." We have updated our popular document design material (Chapters 21, 22, and 24), and our chapters on writing processes (Chapters 1-5) now explore design issues at every stage of a project. Our coverage of visual literary also includes several entirely new chapters and sections:
• The NEW Chapter 13, "How Do You Prepare an Oral or Multimedia Report?" helps writers prepare traditional oral reports as well as presentations that incorporate technological elements, including presentation software. Full-color examples of PowerPoint slides illustrate effective ways to present information visually.
• The NEW Chapter 23, "How Do You Create a Web Site?" represents our first full chapter on writing for the Web. This detailed chapter presents step-by-step instructions for crafting a Web page from start to finish. Designed to serve both Web novices and more experienced Web writers, this beautifully illustrated chapter offers assistance to writers for working with a basic HTML editor or with more helpful Web-authoring software. Web design has never looked so easy!
• Because many college courses now include online components, we've added to Chapter 8 a practical NEW section on using courseware such as Blackboard. Full-color illustrations introduce students to the basic features and uses of course management software enabling students to approach online assignments with confidence.
• Chapter 11, "How Do You Interpret and Use Visual Texts?" has been updated and expanded, incorporating many NEW examples of visual rhetoric and a NEW student paper that analyzes a print advertisement, demonstrating critical visual literary in action.
• Chapter 14, "How Do You Write About Literature?" now includes sections on analyzing films and television as literary artifacts.
• NEW photos and images appear throughout the book and many were created by the text authors themselves in order to reinforce key points about writing, style, and mechanics.
• NEW, extensive Companion Website^™ at www.prenhall.com/hairston offers:
• An E-Book available 24/7 that contains the entire The Scott Foresman Handbook, Seventh Edition, in a searchable format, which enables students to find information quickly and easily.
• A self-graded diagnostic test that assists students in identifying problem areas and creates a personalized handbook, My Handbook. Students are provided with information and exercises in order to improve their problem areas. Competency tests are also available so students can assess their own progress.
• Hundreds of interactive, text-tied, and self-graded exercises including editing activities.
• Additional information on research and documentation styles.
• More Examples of Real Writers at Work. The pages of The Scott Foresman Handbook are filled with photos of student and professional writers at work, as we're happy to give a human face to this reference book. For the seventh edition, we showcase even more writers, representing a wider range of academic, civic, and professional projects and writing situations. These include the following:
• NEW "ESL Tips" appear throughout Chapters 34, 35, and 36, each offering advice from successful ESL writers on negotiating problematic areas of academic English. These chapters have also been revised to include more discussion of rhetorical and cultural dimensions of college writing in the U.S., supplementing our coverage of grammatical and mechanical conventions.
• A NEW section on writing centers in Chapter 8 introduces students to this important campus resource for improving their writing and gives advice on getting the most from a writing center consultation.
• NEW student samples throughout the book, including an APA paper originally published in an undergraduate online research journal. Also, to reinforce our emphasis on real-world writing, there are updated "Going Public" examples showing students engaged in public and community writing.
• Updated and Expanded Research Coverage. No part of The Scott Foresman Handbook has been more widely admired (or imitated) than its chapters on research and documentation. As in previous editions, we provide everything instructors and writers need to prepare traditional academic research papers, as well as thorough guidelines for electronic, service-oriented, and community-oriented projects. In this edition, we have rearranged and enhanced this material so that it's even more user-friendly. Examples of this include the following:
• Research coverage is regrouped into six smaller, more accessible chapters (46-51) enabling students to locate this information easily at each stage of a project.
• The NEW Chapter 52, "What Is Documentation?" answers basic questions students often ask about documentation, explaining, for example, why most writing instructors teach MLA style and how MLA, APA, and CMS styles differ.
• All research and documentation material has been freshly updated, and a NEW sample APA paper appears in Chapter 54.

What's Familiar

• A Respected, Proven Resource. Although we've made many revisions to this new edition, the most important features of The Scott Foresman Handbook haven't changed. The handbook retains its authoritative discussion of the writing process; its full coverage of critical thinking and reading, argumentation, and academic writing; its engaging and thorough treatment of grammar, mechanics, and usage; its lively discussion of research; and its exhaustive treatment of documentation. Because we teach undergraduate writing courses year after year, we know that student writers need accurate, current information. We've applied this knowledge in the creation of The Scott Foresman Handbook.
• Serving Students Best. Since its first edition, The Scott Foresman Handbook has strived to serve students better and help them achieve their writing goals. With this in mind, each chapter is framed around the questions students commonly ask about writing, rather than presenting rules and terminology out of context. Our research materials have been carefully refined, edition after edition, and are clear, easy, and manageable. As in past editions, we continue to tackle thorny issues such as evaluating electronic sources, plagiarism, civil language, and, uniquely, grades. Perhaps most important, we continue to address student writers in language that is both personal and encouraging. We recognize that writing is hard work and that even a volume as thick as this one only begins to address the complexities writers face in sharing their ideas. We are committed to students' writing success.
• Extending Beyond the Classroom. Our support for student writing extends beyond the classroom. The Scott Foresman Handbook provides support for writers moving from academic assignments to work in their local communities. In addition to Chapter 9, "How Do You Write for the Public?" the handbook emphasizes civic and public issues throughout, in the many "Going Public" examples, the discussions of service-learning and online courses, and the many sample student papers focused on civic and public issues. We want writers to know and believe that their "writing matters."

Supplements

Resources for Instructors

• The Instructor's Resource Manual: Creating a Community of Writers offers guidance to new and experienced instructors for teaching in the composition classroom. ISBN 013-182392-2
• Answer Key to the exercises within The Scott Foresman Handbook, Seventh Edition. ISBN 013-182390-6
• Our course management solutions, Blackboard, Course Compass^—, and WebCT ad...

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1025 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 7 edition (August 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131234714
• ISBN-13: 978-0131234710
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5 x 2.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,142,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent college writing handbook, September 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers (Hardcover)

I'm an English instructor at Ohio State University. I chose this handbook above others (The Everyday Writer, The New St. Martin's Handbook) because it not only contains the usual grammar and style points in straightforward language, but also covers issues such as preparing to write, writing good arguments, avoiding argumentative fallacies, and how to respond to other people's written drafts in constructive ways. It's great to use as an instructional text because it comes with questions and exercises on the various sections. It's up-to-date about using visuals in texts, and using the web to research, and authoring websites. I'm using it for the first time to teach Sept-Dec 99, and I'll write back afterwards with a review of how successful it was and whether students liked it or not.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Helpful, March 15, 2006

By 

Keith A. Leonhard (Point Pleasant, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Scott Foresman Handbook for Writers with I-Book & 2003 MLA Update Package (7th Edition) (Hardcover)

I found this book to be very helpful in a number of areas. From developing a well written paper to using correct grammar, this book is it! It is easy to understand and uses a well thoughtout formula which is great for the novice. This book will be within easy reach for years to come.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Straightforward and Comprehensive, March 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sf Handbk for Writers 2/e 91 (Paperback)

This book is aimed mostly at students and inexperienced writers. The subjects covered range from commonly-confused words to punctuation to creative inspiration to revision to research papers and business letters -- basically, everything. For students, there are sections on how to write for particular academic subjects.

As a general reference, this book has just about everything you'd need, although the sections on computerized research and word processing are a bit outdated. There is plenty of advice for people who need help with grammar or who are trying to make their writing less awkward and more effective. It is well-indexed, allowing you to quickly find answers and advice, which is good because plodding through the book sequentially (even with the help of the table of contents) would be very tedious.