A new framework for developing habits of mind. Becoming a college writer, a new feature of the ninth edition, takes students beyond what they need to know and emphasizes how they need to think. The new student introduction and corresponding interior pages emphasize ways in which students can develop the academic habits that will foster their success as college writers: curiosity, engagement, reflection, and responsibility. These pages offer insights from peer college writers, advice from author and writing expert Nancy Sommers, a prompt that helps students draw on earlier experiences with writing, and cross-references to practical help in their handbook.

Print and media work together to make the content more useful, more engaging. Print pages teach the handbook’s lessons with advice and examples; e-Pages provide opportunities for students to practice, apply, and reflect on the lessons. The e-Pages, online at [[URL]], include 200 practice exercises and 36 writing prompts that strengthen student’s editing, build rhetorical skills, and report to a gradebook. The e-Pages also include LearningCurve, which offers game-like, adaptive quizzing for many handbook topics. The two types of content—print and media—work together to help students strengthen writing skills and behaviors. And easy-to-spot cross-references direct students from the print pages to the e-Pages and back.

New writing guides help students get even more out of their handbook. Five new guides support students as they compose both common and new college assignments: argument, analysis, annotated bibliography, reflection, and literacy narrative. The guides help students understand the expectations of the genre and provide a path as they explore, draft, and revise.

Strategies for reading critically and reflectively. Users asked us to help students to become stronger college readers in order to read a wider range of texts—traditional and multimodal selections, research sources, their own drafts, and the work of their peers. A completely revised Part II, Academic Reading and Writing, emphasizes active reading as the foundation of every college research and writing assignment.

A new approach to research that takes students beyond reporting. Substantially revised advice, examples, and illustrations help students engage in the research process, find entry points in debates, and develop their authority as researchers. The emphasis is on helping beginning college researchers transition from reporting the research of others to contributing to a conversation among researchers.

A process approach to documentation—with more models than ever. Practical how-to boxes and revised citation at a glance pages encourage students to ask questions and take steps to gather the information needed to cite even the trickiest sources responsibly. More than 300 models in MLA, APA, and Chicago styles—arranged for quick access—cover a wide range of sources and formats.