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 Newspaper

Imagine a travel "guide" in which points of interest, lodgings, local history, restaurants and climate were all jumbled together in one alphabet soup and you get the flavor of newspaper stylebooks. It is an awkward genre.

This is a shame because a world of rapidly changing technology, world politics, economics and culture puts a real strain on publishers without the resources to research style questions themselves. Publishers, editors and writers have questions far deeper than simple spelling or punctuation. What are the rules for applying the publication's preferred usage to columnists? Do you grant them carte blanche choice of words, but draw the line at spelling? Do celebrity contributors get special treatment?

What about court papers? (on September 28, 1999 The New York Times report on the outcome of the U.S. Second Court of Appeals decision on the Tasini case quoted Judge Winter's comments on "data bases" (two words separated by a space) while the official transcript of the case spelled the word "database." (one word). Since databases were what the case was all about, one would have thought that the Times copydesk would have been scrupulous in quoting the transcript precisely. Or is this a case where a stylebook spelling trumps all others? One wonders. If there is a rationale for changing the spelling of a court transcript, it belongs in a style guide.

Are style changes made on a rolling basis? If so, how are they promulgated? By the company intranet? By paper memo? Or are a great bundle of changes saved up and put in place at once in the manner of an industrial model changeover? (this is evidently the Times' preference) These are vital questions to many publishers. If an intranet is used, are staff members invited to contribute their opinions on specific usage questions. If so, does the style editor abide by a clear consensus?

Another question concerns reliance on dictionaries as authoritative resources for questions not found in a stylebook. The new NYT stylebook says it relies principally on the Webster New World College Dictionary. But dictionaries are now subject to the shrinkage of resources that afflicts other publishing; they sometimes make do with carry-over entries that in prior years would have been thoroughly and freshly researched. They also outsource whole categories of topics without insisting on impartial research (I once tracked down the reason the hyphenated version of "online" was lingering into the 90's and discovered that it was embedded in the spellchecker of Microsoft Word. Microsoft based the spellchecker on the American Heritage dictionary, which had outsourced its computer terms to a British-born professor of computer science in an obscure Virginia college. Reached by phone, he said he put the hyphen in online because "it looks so nice that way, don't you think?" This is authoritative?

So the question is, should a stylebook advise readers to put blind faith in dictionaries, or do their own research when an important term is at issue?

The question of power comes into play in two ways in publication usage. At the Times, ultimate power on usage rests with the publisher. The decision to adopt the title, "Ms.", was made very tardily and after considerable argument, by publisher fiat, according to Times executives' accounts. So a discussion of how the politics of usage questions get resolved would be in order.

Perhaps more important is the question of whether a superpower of journalism, such as the Times, should exert its influence to bat down ugly neologisms when they first appear and to offer plausible alternatives. The term "Gen X" to describe people in their twenties is just such an ugly weed. The new NYT stylebook says Gen X is "faddish" but offers no alternative, nor clear advice on how to proceed. Could the Times have worked to advance a more intelligent term? The new stylebook says GenX applies to people born in the 60's and 70's. Are people born in the 80's and 90's thus Gen Y? And what do we do after Gen Z ? A discussion of such issues is needed.

The bottom line: the sheer quality of editorial output, its quality, the immense worldwide respect for the New York Times confer superpower status to its style and usage practices. A well-organized narrative text that examines the infrastructure of its practices would have been an outstanding contribution to journalism.

Should you buy this book? Sure; it's the newest, most comprehensive of its type. Take a look at the entry for "men and women" and you'll find an admirable exposition of the Times' efforts to maintain equality of treatment in its editorial voice. But it is too bad that such a grand opportunity for a true `guide" has been missed.

(It should be noted that there seem to be no provisions for updating the stylebook for the general public, either on the company's web site or via CD-ROM.)

Jeff Pemberton CEO, Online Inc.


A great and indispensable reference book   February 6, 2002
 14 out of 15 found this review helpful

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.


Imus will make this a bestseller   November 7, 1999
 10 out of 82 found this review helpful

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.}


Say it as simply as possible.   September 28, 2003
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

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.


Use it as a standard for commercial writing   August 17, 2000
 8 out of 13 found this review helpful

As a copywriter, I have relied on the earlier edition of the NY Time Manual, not only as an easily used guide to style and usage, but as an acceptable authority my clients and I can share. Inevitably, questions come up in commercial writing, and the Times Manual is a readily available arbiter we can turn to for the answers. It saves a lot of time and aggravation.