Use a handbook. Start a habit.

Dear Colleagues:

Welcome to the ninth edition of The Bedford Handbook. Two questions guided my work on this edition: How do students become college writers? And how can a handbook help students learn the expectations of academic writing? We know that becoming a confident college writer is an apprenticeship, a process that takes practice and doesn’t happen—for any student—in a single course or semester. And we also know that the more students rely on their handbook and learn from its lessons, the more effective they will become as writers.

So to prepare for the ninth edition, I did what we ask of our students—research—and surveyed more than 1,000 first-year writers at 35 colleges and universities to learn how students interpret their college writing assignments and read their teachers’ comments, how they define revision and research, and how they endeavor to become good academic writers. I listened to students’ questions and assumptions about college writing—as well as their advice for their fellow students.

The results of the survey clearly pointed to this conclusion: Students are more likely to become successful college writers if they develop good habits. In other words, good academic habits make good college writers. These habits—curiosity, engagement, responsibility, and reflection, often called habits of mind— develop over time and provide a foundation for academic success. This discovery reinforces what many of us have learned from the literature in composition (especially from the recent work of the Council of Writing Program Administrators¹) and has allowed me to imagine, in response, practical handbook advice for students.

As you look through the ninth edition, you’ll discover many innovations inspired by the survey to help your students become curious, engaged, responsible, and reflective readers and writers. All good writing, for instance, starts with curiosity, and in the ninth edition students are offered specific strategies that foster curiosity: asking questions, practicing inquiry, finding entry points in research conversations, and developing thesis statements to open up conversations with their readers. And to foster engagement, the new edition offers much more practical support for reading and conversing with texts in a variety of modes and genres and for reading drafts, both students’ own work and the work of peers. To become engaged writers, students need to become thoughtful, engaged readers.

One of the most important habits students can learn is how to use a handbook to answer the basic question “How do I write a good college paper?” Using a trusted, authoritative reference is a good academic habit that will serve your students throughout their college careers. Doing so demonstrates responsibility. To encourage students to use their handbooks, the ninth edition includes the topics, advice, and examples you’d expect in the print pages of the book—accompanied by many, many opportunities to practice its lessons online in the book’s e-Pages.

In the new e-Pages, you’ll find writing prompts, called As you write, that ask students to apply handbook advice to their own work and practice the skills they need for college writing—crafting and revising thesis statements, asking a research question, reading texts critically, writing in various genres, editing their work, and making revision suggestions to peers. You’ll also find exercises on every grammar, style, and punctuation topic. These are in addition to the exercises offered in the print book. The e-Pages encourage students to develop habits of curiosity, engagement, responsibility, and reflection as they develop the habit of using their handbook.

The ninth edition serves your needs as well as your students’ needs. The Instructor’s Annotated Edition shares more than 100 tips from my own teaching—ways to integrate the handbook and facilitate your students’ development as writers, editors, and researchers. And you’ll find that having the handbook in a combined print and online format allows you to insert custom content, such as favorite assignments or handouts, as new e-Pages, easily and conveniently. The content becomes more useful, and teaching with the handbook becomes even easier.

I am eager to share the ninth edition of The Bedford Handbook with you and with your students.