A new approach to U.S. academic English. International students and Generation 1.5 English speakers aren’t the only students puzzled by English structures and academic genres. Following best practices in the field of composition and rhetoric, coverage of these topics in The St. Martin’s Handbook is integrated throughout this edition so that the information is accessible to students from all language and educational backgrounds. Students can benefit from learning more about academic genres and formal English structures, and from understanding more about other Englishes used by their classmates, co-workers, and neighbors. The advice for multilingual writers comes from expert contributors Paul Kei Matsuda and Christine Tardy. Look for the “Multilingual” icon to find content of particular use to multilingual writers, or see the directory.

An awareness that today’s academic writing goes beyond print. My conversations with instructors nationwide show that students engage eagerly with the many new kinds of academic projects they are asked to create—from blogs and wikis to presentations and PechaKuchas—but that they still need help composing such work for academic audiences. Advice in The St. Martin’s Handbook never assumes that students are producing only traditional print projects for their coursework. Updated chapters (in the new part “Designing and Performing Writing”) help students make decisions about design, functionality, and style to create rhetorically effective multimodal texts. Model student writing in the print book and in the accompanying LaunchPad media includes presentations, Web pages, essays with live links, and other digital-first texts as well as print-based genres such as essays, research projects, and analyses.

An explicit focus on reflection to make learning stick. Most chapters begin with a “Connect, Create, Reflect” box that teachers can incorporate into their classroom activities or assignments and that students can use on their own. In each box, the “Connect” question makes explicit connections between the material in the chapter and material elsewhere in The St. Martin’s Handbook, encouraging students to become familiar with the handbook and use it to answer their writing questions. The “Create” suggestion asks students to produce some kind of text, and the “Reflect” prompt asks students to think about their own writing processes. Most chapters also end with “Thinking Critically” exercises that encourage additional reflection. And throughout the “Writing Process” chapters (Chapters 1–6), I’ve included explicit reminders to reflect—see, for instance, section 4m, “Reflecting on your writing.”

More help with academic reading. Because reading in print isn’t the same as reading online, I’ve added a new section 7a, “Reading print and digital texts,” to give students tools to understand and adapt to the differences. And because reading scholarly work, such as an article in a journal, will be necessary for most students throughout their academic years, I’ve worked with two students who modeled the critical reading process—previewing, annotating, summarizing, and analyzing an assigned journal article (7b–e).

A focus on the “why” as well as the “how” of documenting sources. New coverage of the basics of various documentation styles helps students understand why academic work calls for more specific citation than popular writing, how to tell the difference between a work from a database and a work online, why medium matters, and more. And additional visual help (including color-coding) with documentation models makes it easy to see what information writers should include in citations.

Integrated, interactive, assignable digital content. The LaunchPad for The St. Martin’s Handbook takes advantage of all the Web can do. You’ll find videos of student writers talking about their work, with prompts asking students to reflect on their own processes; texts by student writers in multiple genres with activities for analysis and reflection; tutorials and visual exercises; and LearningCurve adaptive quizzing activities that students can use to practice on their own. LaunchPad for The St. Martin’s Handbook is available free with the purchase of a new book.