Cover: Bedford Basics, 3rd Edition by Diana Hacker; Wanda Van Goor

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Bedford Basics

Third  Edition©1998  Diana Hacker; Wanda Van Goor

ISBN:9781457648571

About

Good college writers are curious, engaged, reflective, and responsible. They read critically. They write with purpose. They tune into their audience. They collaborate and seek feedback. They know credible evidence makes them credible researchers. They revise. We know this because feedback from over 1,000 first-year college students helped influence the content in this streamlined version of the Bedford Handbook. Bedford Basics promotes good habits for college writers, taking into account all types of students, including distance learners and students using the book on their own.

Table of Contents

PART I. THE WRITING PROCESS
1. Generating ideas; sketching a plan
2. Roughing out an initial draft
3. Making global revisions; revising sentences
4. Choosing a document design

PART II. CONSTRUCTING PARAGRAPHS
5. Focusing on a main point
6. Developing the main point
7. Improving coherence

PART III. CLEAR SENTENCES
8. Coordination and subordination
9. Parallelism
10. Needed words
11. Mixed constructions
12. Misplaced and dangling modifiers
13. Shifts
14. Emphasis
15. Variety

PART IV. WORD CHOICE
16. Wordy sentences
17. Appropriate language
18. Exact Words

PART V. GRAMMATICAL SENTENCES
19. Sentence fragments
20. Run-on sentences
21. Subject-verb agreement (is or are, etc.)
22. Pronoun-antecedent agreement (singular or plural)
23. Pronoun reference (clarity)
24. Pronoun case (I or me, etc.)
25. Who or whom
26. Adjectives and adverbs (good or well, etc.)
27. Standard English verb forms
28. Verb tense, mood, and voice

PART VI. ESL TROUBLE SPOTS
29. Special problems with verbs
30. The articles a, an, and the
31. Other trouble spots

PART VII. PUNCTUATION
32. The comma
33. Unnecessary commas
34. The semicolon
35. The colon
36. The apostrophe
37. Quotation marks
38. End punctuation
39. Other punctuation marks: the dash, parentheses, brackets, the ellipsis mark, the slash

PART VIII. MECHANICS
40. Abbreviations
41. Numbers
42. Italics (underlining)
43. Spelling
44. The hyphen
45. Capital letters

PART IX. GRAMMAR BASICS
46. Introduction
47. Parts of speech
48. Sentence patterns
49. Subordinate word groups
50. Sentence types

Glossary of Usage
Answers to Tutorials, Guided Practice, and Preview Exercises
Index

Diana Hacker

Diana Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students over thirty-five years at Prince George's Community College in Maryland, where she was a member of the English faculty. Hacker handbooks, built on innovation and on a keen understanding of the challenges facing student writers, are the most widely adopted in America. Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin's, include A Writer's Reference, Eleventh Edition (2025); A Pocket Style Manual, Tenth Edition (2025); The Bedford Handbook, Twelfth Edition (2023); Rules for Writers, Tenth Edition (2022); and Writer’s Help 2.0, Hacker Version.

Wanda Van Goor