Ritter Robert M.. - New Harts rules: the Oxford style guide

New Harts Rules is a guide to style designed for people writing or working with text in English. Its twenty-one chapters give a full account of such matters as capitalization, hyphenation, abbreviation, italicization, notes and references, work titles, quotations, bibliography, and publishing terms. Advice is given on dealing with scientific and foreign-language material, and on preparing lists, tables, and illustrations. The text is clearly written and laid out, with short paragraphs and many illustrative examples.

Harts Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford was first printed in 1893. Horace Henry Hart (18401916) was Printer to the University of Oxford and Controller of the University Press between 1883 and 1915. Harts Rules was originally a slim twenty-four-page booklet intended only for staff of the printing house at the Clarendon Press, the learned imprint of Oxford University Press, but Hart decided to publish it for the public after finding copies of it for sale. In all, Harts Rules was published in thirty-nine editions. Over time its size and influence grew, and it came to be regarded as the essential handbook for editors and typesetters. In 2002 a new edition was published under the name The Oxford Guide to Style. It revised and expanded Harts Rules, and was published in a larger format. New Harts Rules marked a return to the Harts Rules name and small handbook format that have been renowned for more than a hundred years.

New Harts Rules has been written for contemporary writers and editors of all kinds. Whereas the original Harts concentrated on style appropriate to academic publications, New Harts Rules responds to the challenge of a wider constituency. Authors, including self-publishers, copy-editors, proofreaders, designers, typesetters, and anyone working on ebooks, websites, and other digital products, newspapers, magazines, reports, or theses will find here the advice they need on the language and presentation of their text.

New Harts Rules continues to explain the house style traditionally used at Oxford University Press, but it also gives a full account of widely used contemporary practices in all areas of writing and publishing, and makes clear the differences, where they exist, between British and American style; a new chapter focusing exclusively on this topic has been added in this edition.

Most of the illustrative examples in New Harts Rules are taken from the Oxford English Corpus, a database containing hundreds of millions of words of real English, or from the Oxford Reading Programme. The books spellings and recommendations are consistent with those given in the current range of Oxford dictionaries, and with those in the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors.

New Harts Rules forms part of a trio of books designed specifically for writers and editors, along with the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors and the New Oxford Spelling Dictionary. These three books continue to form the complete reference set for everyone who is concerned to reach the highest standards in producing written works. They are intended to be used alongside a current Oxford dictionary such as the newly relaunched Oxford Dictionary website (www.oxforddictionaries.com), the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (twelfth edition, 2011) or the slightly larger Oxford Dictionary of English (third edition, 2010), which also includes encyclopedic material. For copy-editors the standard reference is Judith Butchers Copy-Editing: The Cambridge Handbook for Editors, Authors and Publishers (fourth edition, 2006).

This edition of New Harts Rules: The Oxford Style Guide is also available online, on the Oxford Dictionaries website. The site is updated regularly and gives you free access to our largest dictionary and thesaurus of current English as well as bilingual dictionaries for many languages. It also offers information on usage, grammar, and writing, our Word of the Day, a language blog, and more. In addition, the Gold subscription package features millions of example sentences and specialist language reference resourcesincluding this book and the New Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Find Oxford Dictionaries online at www.oxforddictionaries.com.