New college writers come from a wide range of backgrounds and communities. And for many, academic reading and writing skills are ones they must learn and practice. Enter Rules for Writers. It’s an easy-to-use, comprehensive composition tool with the quality you expect from authors you trust. It empowers students by teaching them how to meet new expectations and by giving them the practice that builds confidence. With trusted advice for writing well, reading critically, and working with sources, Rules for Writers now has even more help for underprepared and inexperienced writers—sentence guides that foster an academic voice, tips for spotting fake news and misleading sources, more on paraphrasing, and fifteen new “how-to” pages that offer practical help for writing challenges. Rules for Writers is available with LaunchPad Solo for Hacker Handbooks, our online course area. With interactive activities, adaptive quizzes, model answers and video tutorials, LaunchPad Solo helps you get the most out of your course.
Nancy Sommers Book order (chronological)


The Bedford Handbook
- 818 pages
- 29 hours of reading
The Bedford Handbook carries on the Hacker tradition by responding to student writers’ needs and to the way students need their handbook to work. Still a full-size handbook that doubles as a reference, the Handbook features clear, straightforward advice, hand-edited sentences, a user-friendly index, and a handy format. The eighth edition combines classic Hacker usability with a next-generation focus on academic writing and research and new navigation that helps students pull together advice and models for each assignment. Developed with the help of students and teachers at more than 35 colleges and universities, the new edition reflects the ways students write and revise in their composition course and beyond. What’s more, The Bedford Handbook remains a portable size; it’s still a comprehensive reference that’s as easy to consult as it is to carry.