Full Description
Based on surveys with more than 1,000 first-year college students, Bedford Basics fosters good habits for college writers, taking into account all types of students, from distance learners, to those in classroom, to those learning independently and using the book on their own.
Contents
PART I. THE WRITING PROCESS
1. Generating ideas; sketching a plan
2. Roughing out an initial draft
3. Making global revisions; revising sentences
4. Choosing a document design
PART II. CONSTRUCTING PARAGRAPHS
5. Focusing on a main point
6. Developing the main point
7. Improving coherence
PART III. CLEAR SENTENCES
8. Coordination and subordination
9. Parallelism
10. Needed words
11. Mixed constructions
12. Misplaced and dangling modifiers
13. Shifts
14. Emphasis
15. Variety
PART IV. WORD CHOICE
16. Wordy sentences
17. Appropriate language
18. Exact Words
PART V. GRAMMATICAL SENTENCES
19. Sentence fragments
20. Run-on sentences
21. Subject-verb agreement (is or are, etc.)
22. Pronoun-antecedent agreement (singular or plural)
23. Pronoun reference (clarity)
24. Pronoun case (I or me, etc.)
25. Who or whom
26. Adjectives and adverbs (good or well, etc.)
27. Standard English verb forms
28. Verb tense, mood, and voice
PART VI. ESL TROUBLE SPOTS
29. Special problems with verbs
30. The articles a, an, and the
31. Other trouble spots
PART VII. PUNCTUATION
32. The comma
33. Unnecessary commas
34. The semicolon
35. The colon
36. The apostrophe
37. Quotation marks
38. End punctuation
39. Other punctuation marks: the dash, parentheses, brackets, the ellipsis mark, the slash
PART VIII. MECHANICS
40. Abbreviations
41. Numbers
42. Italics (underlining)
43. Spelling
44. The hyphen
45. Capital letters
PART IX. GRAMMAR BASICS
46. Introduction
47. Parts of speech
48. Sentence patterns
49. Subordinate word groups
50. Sentence types
Glossary of Usage
Answers to Tutorials, Guided Practice, and Preview Exercises
Index
