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Getting a Handle on Handbooks
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by Catherine Haar
Oakland University
Rochester Hills, Michigan
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| | Know What You Need
Handbooks, like the Three Bears, come in large, medium, and small. For your AP English Language and Composition classes, the middle size is probably just right.
Medium-size handbooks run to about 500 pages. They cover grammar, style, mechanics, research, and documentation and perhaps reading, critical thinking, the writing process, and ideas for papers. You'll appreciate the spiral binding, tabs, and engaging titles of Houghton Mifflin's Keys for Writers: A Brief Handbook, third edition, by Ann Raimes and Prentice Hall's Quick Access, third edition, by Lynn Troyka. Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference, in its fifth edition and published by Bedford/St. Martin's, is another popular midsize handbook.
Lester Faigley's The Brief Penguin Handbook, a 2003 publication by Pearson Education, and The SF Writer, second edition, by John Ruszkiewicz, Maxine Hairston, and Daniel E. Seward and published by Longman, cost just a few dollars more than the other midsize handbooks but may be worth it for their coverage of visual rhetoric and Web publishing as well as their highly visual, student-friendly designs. All of these midsized books look and feel streamlined, yet they contain examples and sufficient explanation to be clear and understandable.
Minihandbooks -- also spiral bound with half-width pages -- are light, streamlined, and easily tucked into a student's notebook. For that reason, you might want to choose this size. These books offer condensed, occasionally cryptic coverage of grammar, punctuation, style, research, and documentation (usually MLA, APA, and perhaps Chicago), few examples, and no exercises, usually in about 200 pages. Diana Hacker's A Pocket Style Manual, third edition, published by Bedford/St. Martin's, is the scaled-down version of Hacker's medium-sized book, as is Ann Raimes's Pocket Keys for Writers, Houghton Mifflin.
Full-scale handbooks of 700 to 900 or more pages are handsome, often hardcover, and heavy. Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers, sixth edition, by Lynn Troyka, is a representative example that shows the specialized material available in a long handbook: grammar for nonnative speakers of English, a section on business writing, expanded discussion of rhetoric and reading, material on writing for the World Wide Web, document design, and all major documentation systems. These books contain sections not immediately applicable to an AP English Language and Composition class and are expensive and cumbersome. Therefore, they may be suitable as classroom resources rather than individual student texts.
Since many publishers have started linking their print versions of handbooks to online, expanded handbooks and also offer ancillary exercises either in book form or online, some of the differences between the three categories start to blur a little.
Making the Most of Handbooks
Despite the size differences, the books are strikingly similar in two major ways. First is the possibility that a handbook will be misused. It isn't enough to tell a student, "Well, I'm surprised to see you making that mistake; it is covered in the handbook." You shouldn't assume that owning a handbook means students will automatically fix problems. Handbooks also are misused if they convey a message that error is shameful. Readers of Mina Shaughnessy and other scholars of language development know that error is a part of growth. A student who writes, "Swimming with amazing speed, its eyes intent on its prey, the girl had every reason to fear the shark," needs assistance organizing her interesting language, not criticism for dangling a modifier.
The second similarity: all handbooks are organized by the logic of "the subject." Some writers conceive the subject of English one way and others another way, but when students look at a handbook, they see an organization put together by language experts and pleasing to those experts. The students don't necessarily have an easy way in to any of these books. (Some of the handbook writers, alert to this problem, have started offering tutorials or guided help for using their handbooks.) Even if correction symbols or page numbers key to a particular section, students still make most of their mistakes because something doesn't look like a mistake to them.
Students in AP writing classes need your support and modeling to use any handbook well. That means scheduling peer groups for two-step revising: first, substantive revising, for overall strategies of organizing, developing, and conceptualizing; second, careful editing, using the handbook. Peer groups can practice using the handbook. You can show students how to consult the handbook -- for example, the section in the back that distinguishes between "effect" and "affect" and other easily confused terms. Even when told to do so, students usually don't browse through their handbooks.
You will help your students prepare for college by using the documentation sections to teach current documentation systems, generally MLA or APA. That means in-text, parenthetical documentation and a "works cited" or "references" section at the end. Footnotes, a purgatory we all went through, now belong to a former age except in certain formats for professional publishing.
Catherine Haar has taught college writing at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, since 1987. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Maryland.
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