A Writer's Resource: A Handbook for Writing and Research

As we wrote the first edition of The McGraw-Hill Handbook, our students were in our minds, acting as our chief consultants. We knew that their perspectives on college life were different from those of previous generations of students, and so were their expectations. We understood that they needed a handbook for the twenty-first century, with state-of-the-art resources on writing, researching, and graphic design. They might be using a handbook in an English composition class at 9:00 AM, but at 10:00 AM they might be preparing PowerPoints for a speech course, and at 11:00 AM they might need the handbook to help with a history assignment. More than any other textbook, their handbook was their guide, not just to writing, but also to learning in college.

In revising the second edition, we have endeavored to make it an even stronger and more varied resource for achieving excellence in the ever-changing digital environment that students confront in college.

Elaine P. Maimon is President of Governors State University in the south suburbs of Chicago, where she is also Professor of English. Previously she was Chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, Provost (Chief Campus Officer) at Arizona State University West, and Vice President of Arizona State University as a whole. In the 1970s, she initiated and then directed the Beaver College writing-across-the-curriculum program, one of the first WAC programs in the nation. A founding Executive Board member of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA), she has directed national institutes to improve the teaching of writing and to disseminate the principles of writing across the curriculum. With a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where she later helped to create the Writing Across the University (WATU) program, she has also taught and served as an academic administrator at Haverford College, Brown University, and Queens College.

Kathleen Blake Yancey is the Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and Composition at Florida State University. Past President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators (WPA) and Past Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), she is President of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). In addition, she co-directs the Inter/National Coalition on Electronic Portfolio Research. She has directed several institutes focused on electronic portfolios and on service learning and reflection, and with her colleagues in English Education, she is working on developing a program in new literacies. Previously, she has taught at UNC Charlotte and at Clemson University, where she directed the Pearce Center for Professional Communication and created the Class of 1941 Studio for Student Communication, both of which are dedicated to supporting communication across the curriculum.

Janice Haney Peritz is an Associate Professor of English who has taught college writing for more than thirty years, first at Stanford University, where she received her PhD in 1978, and then at the University of Texas at Austin; Beaver College; and Queens College, City University of New York. From 1989 to 2002, she directed the Composition Program at Queens College, where in 1996, she also initiated the college’s writing-across-the-curriculum program and the English Department’s involvement with the Epiphany Project and cyber-composition. She also worked with a group of CUNY colleagues to develop The Write Site, an online learning center, and more recently directed the CUNY Honors College at Queens College for three years. Currently, she is back in the English Department doing what she loves most: research, writing, and full-time classroom teaching of writing, literature, and culture.