You may use the Handbook on your own when you edit your essays, or your instructor may refer you to specific sections to correct errors in your writing. If using the Handbook on your own, check the Handbook Contents on the previous page, or look in the index for the kind of error you are concerned about.

Your instructor may use the Handbook’s letter-and-number system to lead you directly to information about a specific topic—for example, “P1-b.” The Handbook Contents connects codes to page numbers (in this case, H-51) in the Handbook. As an alternative, you can find P1-b by looking through the tabs at the tops of the pages. Each tab indicates the section code for that page and an abbreviation or symbol for the topic covered. If your instructor indicates errors with correction symbols such as frag or ww, you can find the section where the error is covered by checking the chart in the back of this book.

When you locate the section that will help you correct an error or make a sentence more concise or graceful, you will find a brief explanation and examples of correct usage, along with one or more hand-corrected sentences that demonstrate how to edit a sentence. Terms are defined in the margin. In addition, below the heading of each numbered Handbook section is a URL for interactive online exercises.

While developing this Handbook, ten college writing instructors and four professional editors worked together to identify the twenty-five most common errors^* in more than five hundred student essays written in first-year composition courses. These errors are listed below in order of descending frequency. The codes in bold following each error indicate the section number in this Handbook where you can find help with understanding and correcting each error in your own writing.

^*Spelling errors were not included.