Hacker's Helpful Hints in Rules For Writers

The areas that were the most useful in the book Rules For Writers by Diana Hacker were the ones dealing with writing research papers. The book gives many examples and specific guidelines to help the writer with both research and arguing a well organized paper.

One of the areas in the book that was helpful to me was Chapter 46 on constructing arguments. This Chapter not only advises on how to construct the actual paper, it also tells you how to construct the actual arguments. This Chapter also gives suggestions on how to back up your argument with facts and expert opinions. It even gives an example of an argument paper so you can see how these suggestions are used.

I also learned from Chapter 47 on evaluating arguments and it talks about different tactics writers use to argue their points. This is helpful in evaluating another writers argument as well as giving writers pitfalls to avoid. It gives you specific arguments for you to determine the problems of those arguments.

Another Chapter that was Helpful was Chapter 48 on conducting research. This Chapter first helps you to pick a topic for your paper then how to determine a research strategy. It lists both traditional and nontraditional sources of information. It also gives suggestions on how to narrow your search when you are looking on the internet.

The most valuable Chapter was 49 evaluating sources. This Chapter gave specific guidelines on determining how valuable information is to your topic as well as determining the reliability of the information. It also gives a sort of check list to help achieve this.

These Chapters gave me specific information from picking a topic, developing my arguments, through researching the topic and backing it up with reliable and scholarly sources. This would be a good book to keep for my own reference in the future.