The Everyday Writer

Headshot of Andrea A. Lunsford

Andrea Lunsford , Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English emerita and former Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University, joined the Stanford faculty in 2000. Prior to this appointment, she was Distinguished Professor of English at The Ohio State University (1986-2000) and, before that, Associate Professor and Director of Writing at the University of British Columbia (1977-86) and Associate Professor of English at Hillsborough Community College. A frequent member of the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, Andrea earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Florida and completed her Ph.D. in English at The Ohio State University (1977). She holds honorary degrees from Middlebury College and The University of Ôrebro. Andreas scholarly interests include the contributions of women and people of color to rhetorical history, theory, and practice; collaboration and collaborative writing, comics/graphic narratives; translanguaging and style, and technologies of writing. She has written or coauthored many books, including Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern Discourse; Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing; and Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the History of Rhetoric , as well as numerous chapters and articles. For Bedford/St. Martin’s, she is the author of The St. Martins Handbook, The Everyday Writer , and EasyWriter; the co-author (with John Ruszkiewicz) of Everything’s an Argument and (with John Ruszkiewicz and Keith Walters) of Everything’s an Argument with Readings; and the co-author (with Lisa Ede) of Writing Together: Collaboration in Theory and Practice . She is also a regular contributor to the Bits teaching blog on Bedford/St. Martin’s English Community site. Andrea has given presentations and workshops on the changing nature and scope of writing and critical language awareness at scores of North American universities, served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, as Chair of the Modern Language Association Division on Writing, and as a member of the MLA Executive Council. In her spare time, she serves on the Board of La Casa Roja’s Next Generation Leadership Network, as Chair of the Kronos Quartet Performing Arts Association--and works diligently if not particularly well in her communal organic garden.

Table of Contents

Writing Rhetorically
1. A Writer’s Opportunities
2. A Writer’s Choices
3. Exploring, Planning, and Drafting
4. Developing Paragraphs
5. Reviewing, Revising, and Editing
6. Reflecting

Critical Thinking and Argument
7. Critical Reading
8. Analyzing Arguments
9. Constructing arguments

Research
10. Doing research
11. Evaluating Sources
12. Integrating Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism

Academic, Professional, and Public Writing
13. Writing Well and Ethically in Any Discipline or Profession
14. Writing in the Humanities
15. Writing in the Social Sciences
16. Writing in the Natural and Applied Sciences
17. Writing in Professional Settings
18. Making Design Decisions
19. Creating Presentations
20. Communicating in Other Media
21. Writing to Make Something Happen in the World

Language and Style
22. Language and Identity
23. Language Varieties
24. Writing to the World
25. Language That Builds Common Ground
26. Style Matters!
27. Coordination, Subordination, and Emphasis
28. Consistency and Completeness
29. Parallelism
30 Shifts
31 Conciseness

32. The Top Twenty

Sentence Grammar
33. Parts of Speech
34. Parts of Sentences
35. Verbs and Verb Phrases
36. Nouns and Noun Phrases
37. Subject-Verb Agreement
38. Pronouns
39. Adjectives and Adverbs
40. Modifier Placement
41. Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases
42. Comma Splices and Fused Sentences
43. Sentence Fragments

Punctuation and Mechanics
44. Commas
45. Semicolons
46. End Punctuation
47. Apostrophes
48. Quotation Marks
49. Other Punctuation Marks
50. Capital Letters
51. Abbreviations and Numbers
52. Italics and Hyphens

MLA Documentation
53. The Basics of MLA Style
54. MLA Style for In-Text Citations
55. MLA Style for a List of Works Cited
56. A Student Research Essay, MLA Style

APA Documentation
57. The Basics of APA Style
58. APA Style for In-Text Citations
59. APA Style for a List of References
60. A Student Research Essay, APA Style

Chicago Documentation
61. The Basics of Chicago Style
62. Chicago Style for Notes and Bibliographic Entries
63. An Excerpt from a Student Research Essay, Chicago Style

Product Updates

Summer 2024 Updates:

New! Exclusive Lunsford Content: AI Guides for Instructors and Students.
Boost AI literacy with Using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the Writing Course, a brief resource by Andrea Lunsford that helps college writers understand the opportunities and challenges of AI use in academic settings. Separate instructor and student guides offer support for using AI ethically and responsibly, with assessment to help reinforce concepts. Now available in the Achieve courses for Everything’s an Argument, EasyWriter, Everyday Writer, and Achieve-Writer’s Help-Lunsford.

Eighth Edition Updates (2023):

Achieve with The Everyday Writer provides trusted content with a robust e-textbook, diagnostics with personalized study plans, and writing tools that guide students through drafting, peer review, plagiarism checks, reflection, and revision. For corequisite composition courses, Achieve lets students sign in to their composition and corequisite sections with one easy process–and no additional fees.

A revised opening chapter introduces the handbook as a tool for developing the habits of open-minded readers, writers, and speakers and for balancing the risks and rewards of the choices we make as communicators.

New strategies for critical reading, critical thinking, and fact-checking help students respond to the information and misinformation in news sources and in social media — and help them balance open-mindedness and skepticism as they evaluate sources.

Substantially revised coverage of the research process broadens the notions of “expert” and “expertise” and emphasizes lived experience and community research as inclusive alternatives to traditional scholarly research.

New graphic organizers for argument writing help visual learners plan and execute.

Fresh perspectives from new contributing authors Staci M. Perryman-Clark (Western Michigan University) and Jamila M. Kareem (University of Central Florida) helped us rethink terminology, pedagogy, language, and online learning; Kendra N. Bryant (North Carolina A&T State University) revised chapters in Teaching with Lunsford Handbooks to emphasize antiracist teaching and best practices for teaching with a handbook.