The Electronic St. Martin's Handbook 5.0

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.

Customer Review: Handy, but not that many examples

It's handy for a quick review of formats that you usually already know of, but there's not that many examples for very specific things that you need like quoting sources.

Customer Review: The Best of a Bad Lot

If you are looking for a writing handbook for a college writing class, this is the best there is. Ideally, you should get the paperback, but it appears to be out of print.



The volume wastes little time or space on trivia (web pages, business memos, etc.). The handling of grammar is clear and to the point. Discussions of reading and note-taking, argumentation, and analysis are useful, if not always inspired. Coverage of documentation and research writing is as good as such manuals get, which is to say decent without being fully satisfactory. Much of the pedagogical material interspersed with the rest, particularly about ESL students, cultural backgrounds, writing literature papers, and so forth is very well done.



Unlike every other manual I saw when my program reviewed nearly fifty of these tomes, Lunsford's text is clearly written by someone who understands what students will actually be asked to do in college classes. She doesn't lard the book with a lot of bad Mickey Mouse assignments. Those who actually read the text will find that she moves rapidly from basics (grammar, etc.) into elementary academic writing, which is of course exactly what professors will demand of students. Every other text I read through seems to think that professors want their students to write position papers expressing their opinions!



Lunsford has a charming, clear writing style, and the book is simply and clearly laid out. Those who only flip through it rapidly may think it insufficiently glitzy, but you buy a manual for its content, not its colors.



If you have to choose one writing textbook, this is far and away the best. Unfortunately, that just means it's acceptable, not that it's actually particularly good.



One day someone is going to write a manual that's about 500 pages (instead of 1,000), that's simple and clear and to the point, and that costs about $25. Until that happens, Andrea Lunsford's manual is your best bet for college writing.
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