The most rhetorically grounded comprehensive handbook for composition, The St. Martin’s Handbook continues to do what it has always done: Present Andrea Lunsford’s substantial and timely research with student writers for student writers. The ninth edition reflects a nationwide survey of students and teachers related to how young people interact with others from different language and cultural backgrounds and with people with whom they disagree. New material on college expectations helps students think critically about barriers to and benefits of open and respectful dialogue and offers strategies for communicating outside of one’s comfort zone. Attention to gender and pronouns and to language varieties and identities supports students as they learn to write to include rather than to exclude. And throughout the ninth edition, which assumes students are writing traditional and multimodal projects in a mobile world, Andrea Lunsford asks students to see themselves as communicators in a global world. With new student writing, stronger coverage of argument, new material on defensive reading and fact-checking, more visual help with field research, the most up-to-date citation models, and a range of practice activities, The St. Martin’s Handbook helps a wide variety of college writers succeed.

Click here to find out more about the 2009 MLA Updates and the 2010 APA Updates. Andrea A. Lunsford’s years of experience in the classroom and in the field have given her a unique understanding of how, what, where, and why today’s students write. For her research for The St. Martin’s Handbook — ongoing for over two decades — she has studied thousands of papers by composition students nationwide. Andrea Lunsford’s trademark attention to rhetorical choice, language and style, and critical thinking and argument have always made The St. Martin’s Handbook an accessible and thorough writing resource. Now informed by new research into student writing patterns and featuring expanded and more visual coverage of research, documentation, and writing in any discipline, The St. Martin’s Handbook offers students more help than ever before with meeting the expectations of college work.

Lunsford found that today's students write more than ever before-- and make rhetorically appropriate choices in texts they create outside the classroom. This is the first handbook to help students build on the smart decisions they make as recreational writers in order to succeed in their academic and professional work. It is an all-in-one teaching tool and reference that shows students how to write effectively for any purpose.

This textbook provides instruction in college level rhetoric and writing. It offers readings, a research manual, a handbook and supports a range of approaches to teaching and learning, including collaboration, visual rhetoric, personal writing, writing about literature, writing in the community and the workplace, field research, portfolios, oral presentations, essay exams, and ESL. It contains step-by-step guides to writing specific kinds of essays -- remembering events, writing profiles, explaining a concept, finding common ground, arguing a position, proposing a solution, justifying an evaluation, speculating about causes, and interpreting stories. Because so much college writing requires strong argumentation skills, four of the assignment chapters focus on argumentative writing, and a separate strategies chapter covers theses, reasons and support, counterarguments, and logical fallacies. Three full chapters on research give students useful strategies not only for conducting field, library, and Internet research, but also for evaluating sources; deciding whether to quote, paraphrase, or summarize; avoiding plagiarism; and documenting sources. The authors have included 39 readings by well-known authors and various "fresh" voices, including 12 students, providing well-written examples of the different types of essays and papers that students might be asked to complete.