Having helped nearly 3 million students at 1600 colleges and universities to write well, A Writer’s Reference succeeds because it has always been grounded in classroom experience. Nearly twenty years ago, Diana Hacker reinvented the college handbook by looking at her own students’ needs. She crafted a first-of-its-kind reference that offered practical solutions to college writing problems in a language students could understand and in a format that was easy for them to use. Her many innovations — hand-edited sentences, grammar checker boxes, student-friendly index entries, ESL coverage, and a lay-flat comb binding — have been widely imitated but never improved upon.

In the Hacker tradition, the new contributing authors — Nancy Sommers, Tom Jehn, Jane Rosenzweig, and Marcy Carbajal Van Horn — have crafted solutions for the writing problems of today’s college students. Together they give us a new edition that provides more help with academic writing and that works better for a wider range of multilingual students.