Product Description

"A Pocket Style Manual" provides student writers with the answers to their writing and research questions. With Diana Hacker's trademark straightforward and unpretentious style, "A Pocket Style Manual" is one-third of the price of full-sized handbooks and the book's small size and spiral binding make it as easy to use as it is to carry. It is a reference students can, and will, use on their own. Signature Hacker features help students find the information they need and understand what they find: quick-reference tabs and menus; clean, uncluttered pages; accessible explanations; hand-edited examples; and a user-friendly index.It also offers the ground rules of good writing. In every discipline students need a firm grasp of key skills. A checklist for global revision and practical advice throughout prompts students to review their essays for focus, organization, content, style, and use of sources - universal concerns in all academic writing. It provides discipline-focused advice for research and writing, from thesis to documentation. Students can plan and draft their papers using specific advice for writing and working with sources in humanities and social sciences, with the most up-to-date guidelines for citing sources."A Pocket Style Manual" answers students' writing and research questions. Its concise and straightforward content is flexible enough to suit the needs of students on all courses and its slim format, brief length, and spiral binding make it a portable and practical tool.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #344138 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 288 pages

Review
"'From a student's perspective, A Pocket Style Manual is the perfect size and works as a handy reference tool for all of their classes' -Christine Trochesset, Department of English, Western Illinois University, USA"

About the Author
DIANA HACKER personally class-tested her handbooks with nearly four thousand students over 35 years at Prince George's Community College in Maryland, USA, 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.

Customer Reviews

Cite it right...
`The Pocket Style Manual' compiled by Diana Hacker is one of the most useful tools for student and professional writing available. One of the more confusing aspects of writing for many students (and those beyond student level) is the range of styles for citation, organisation and structure in texts. Different schools and different professions expect their own styles to be applied - just what is the difference between MLA (Modern Language Association) and APA (American Psychological Association) style, anyway? This book provides the answer in short, easy-to-use fashion.

The first section of Hacker's text goes over the basics of good writing - grammar, clarity, punctuation, and essential mechanics such as capitalisation, abbreviation, numbers, etc. This is not a guide that will teach the reader, but rather serve as a reminder, refresher, and quick ready-reference guide for those who (usually at the deadline and in a hurry) need information quickly to finish their assignments and projects.

The three primary styles presented for organising and documenting a research paper are MLA, APA and Chicago - the majority of papers done in sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts are expected to be done in one of these three styles (there are yet other styles, lesser used, as well as foreign styles, but these are relatively rare in the United States). Each section of style shows cover pages, sample pages of text, footnote/endnote formats, as well as the many levels of documentation and citation of sources required. Even with the dozens of documentary examples for sources from books, articles, journals, newspapers, videos, lectures, internet and more, there are always new situations arising that make documentation problematic. This guide does not solve every citation problem, but will solve the vast majority of them.

In the conclusion, there are glossaries of usage, grammatical terms, and a list of style manuals for more in-depth work. Perhaps the one omission here (somewhat surprising to me, given its wide usage in colleges) is that Turabian's `Manual for Writers of Term Papers' is not included in this list.

Overall, the design and format of this book is very useful, incredibly handy, and makes it one that I keep readily available for consultation whenever I write for academic purposes.

The very best
Oh how I wish I had seen this when I was eighteen (I guess it did not exist then!)....I would recommned this without the slightest hesitation....if you hate bulky style guides you need this one....packs a punch in the two hundred odd pages that 'feel' like fifty!

Awesome

Excellent, succinct coverage of style and grammar
I highly recommend this manual--it is very useful for undergraduates, graduate students, and those in the professional world. Some handbooks cover a lot of material but tend to be bulky and intimidating. Hacker's manual, in contrast, is clear, succinct, and non-intimidating. It covers the fine points of grammar, style, essay and research paper writing, and MLA documentation. If I had to recommend one reference book in English style and grammar to own, I would choose this one. I am a Graduate Student in the M.A. English program at Holy Names College and this manual is helping me get through the Program! Note: if you have a few more dollars to spend, get A Writer's Reference. Third Edition. by Hacker...It is an expanded version of the Pocket Style Manual, adding such subjects as ESL trouble spots, preparing Outlines, etc. It also comes with helpful tab dividers for easy reference use.