The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative News Organiza

A PRESENT FOR MY DAUGHTER IN LAW HOW JUST GRADUATED FROM JOURNALISM. SHE FOUND IT COMPLETE AND INTERESTING. THANKS.

I would expect the world's leading daily newspaper to produce a pretty decent style guide and I was not disappointed with this edition. Having always worked in the design side of publishing, where it is necessary to be much more familiar with words and language than other areas of print design, I've collected a few style guides over the years. This manual and the one from The Economist I have found the most interesting. The New York Times book offers clarity and sensibly an alphabetical solution to the contents so that you can look up, for instance, elements of punctuation individually rather than have them all grouped under Punctuation. The manual takes a whole page to explain the use of hyphens and intriguingly uses this example 'Use the suspensive hyphen rather than repeat the second part of a modifier, in cases like this: On successive days there were three-, five- and nine-inch snowfalls' Quite correct but not very elegant I thought. It is this attention to detail and the thoroughness of the manual that impressed me. I think it is worth mentioning here a rather unique style guide by Keith Waterhouse (author of 'Billy Liar) called 'Waterhouse on newspaper style'. I frequently get this out because it such a joy to read. Originally produced for journalists on the Daily Mirror (in the past the leading British tabloid) it is alphabetical but concerned with style more than anything, part of the contents might give you a feel of the subject matter, Adjectives, Alliteration, And now, The asthmatic comma, Captions, Catchwords, Cliches (standard), Cliches (trade), Compression, Consequences, Crossheads, Dead letters, Dots and dashes. It was published in the UK by Viking in 1989 and is well worth searching out.

I wish I had known about this book ten years ago. It's got almost everything I need, as a newsletter editor and technical writer. I love it and use it every day.Strengths: In-depth explanation of hyphenation with prefixes (pre-, in-, under-), very useful for a technical writer.Flaws: It's got a strong NY regional focus (to be expected) and omits some useful words such as "hitchhike".I back it up with the AP stylebook and Fowler's Modern English Usage.

This book is structured as an A-Z reference guide, but I'm about halfway through reading it front to back as if it were a novel. I've already come across dozens of rules of usage that I would never have discovered on my own. They include the types of things you would never pick up from ordinary conversation or casual writing, since almost no one consistently uses them correctly. Do you know the difference between "masterful" and "masterly"? Neither did I. Do you treat the words "enormity" and "enormousness" as if they were synonyms? You shouldn't. Take a peak for yourself at this treasure trove of little known nuances of vocabulary, usage, and correct abbreviation. And it's actually fun to read.

Don Imus, the infamous radio personality whose show is syndicated across the country from 5:30 to 10 AM each day, will make this book a bestseller. He has "hired" several listeners to study the new style manual, read the NYTimes each day, and report to him any errors they find, especially errors in William Safire's columns. Imus admits that this challenge to find errors is a result of: (a) the end of the baseball season, (b) a current lull in politics (his usual passion), (c) his lack of interest in football, and (d) his loathing for basketball. Hence, he needed to find something to ridicule until politics heats up a bit. By issuing a style manual, the Times offered him the chance to embarrass the country's best-known, and possibly best, newspaper. Imagine the pressure on the copy editors. While I'm enjoying Imus's latest obsession, it's made it very difficult for me to read the paper, because I'm now looking for mistakes rather than reading for content. Should be fun. (I rated the book a 5 without benefit of having read it; what I'm really rating is Imus's contest.}