What a difference full sentences and paragraphs make. I haven’t even been reading this book for a month yet and my page-per-day count has skyrocketed. In fact, I’ve read more pages in the last three weeks than there are in the last book I read, which took me almost two months to work through. I do sense a hunger inside me. Whether it’s a craving to tackle some meaty fiction in another few books or the long-repressed desire to write, I can’t say. What I can say is that this book hasn’t been too boring yet.Rather than monthly reading updates like I planned, I sectioned this book off in my mind into groupings of its parts. In my mind, these clusters fit together well enough to break up my reading updates accordingly. This first update covers my thoughts on the introductory sections and the first two parts (seven chapters) of The Bedford Handbook.
Diana Hacker gets most of the credit but there are a lot of people involved in the writing, layout, and editing of this book. Boy, does she ever make sure they get thanked. The preface serves as a hybrid introduction to educators using the book for their students and thank you section. It comes in at a staggering 20 pages. This precedes a nine-page introduction for student users of the book. Then, at long last, comes the contents section. By the time you reach the first section of composition guideline content, 46 pages of roman-numeral fluff stands between you and the book’s cover. Perhaps long-winded introductory sections are standard in these kinds of academic texts but it seems like a bit much to me.
Part 1 contains four chapters covering the writing process. Perhaps it’s a sign that my middle and high school teachers did a good job, because much of these pages struck me as the kind of thing a college student should already know how to do. It’s been a long time since I thought about how to write an essay or a research paper, but the refresher didn’t reveal any secrets that I’ve been missing out on all these years. The author does make a unique distinction between revising (for effectiveness) and editing (for correctness). I don’t recall ever hearing a teacher or professor make that argument before. Then again, many of my final college papers were either really good first drafts or labors of love that I edited while writing.
Part 2 shifts gears and covers document design. Margins, headings, fonts, charts- all of these get some focus with the caveat to incorporate them based on the preferred format for the end reader (academic versus business). I snickered at the chapter covering the differences between paper and web résumé formats, a section that dates this book without question. There was also a chapter on writing website content that is of little use now. Most of Part 2, in fact, is outdated but a few nuggets of wisdom still hold true.
This has been an easy read so far. Some evenings I set out to only read a section or two but I blast through a whole chapter. I’m trying not to read too quickly though, because I want to give this book a chance to reeducate me on any good writing practices I may have forgotten after my work life shifted from word-focused to number-focused. One point in Hacker’s opening sections made me chuckle though. In her introduction for student users, she writes, “…it is unlikely that you will want to study all of the chapters in this book in detail.” She doesn’t know me very well, now does she?
Page Count: 180/928 (19.40%)
Countdown to my next update: 201 pages
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