Name: The New York times manual of style and usage
ISBN: 9780812963885

The New York times manual of style and usage

Is the deejay a wannabe? Or does the D.J. just want to be?When is heaven capitalized?Do you stand in line or on line?For anyone who writes--short stories or business plans, book reports or news articles--knotty choices of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and meaning lurk in every line: Lay or lie? Who or whom? None is or none are? Is Touch-Tone a trademark? How about Day-Glo? It's enough to send you in search of a Martini. (Or is that a martini?) Now everyone can find answers to these and thousands of other questions in the handy alphabetical guide used by the writers and editors of the world's most authoritative newspaper. The guidelines to hyphenation, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are crisp and compact, created for instant reference in the rush of daily deadlines. This revised and expanded edition is updated with solutions to the tantalizing problems that plague writers in the new century: How to express the equality of the sexes without using self-conscious devices like "he or she." How to choose thoughtfully between African-American and black; Hispanic and Latino; American Indian and Native American. How to translate the vocabulary of e-mail and cyberspace and cope with the eccentricities of Internet company names and website addresses. With wry wit, the authors, who have more than seventy-five years of combined newsroom experience at the New York Times, have created an essential and entertaining reference tool.From the Trade Paperback edition.

What Hacker News says

xplusyNov 2016

For writing englishThe 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

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stevewilhelmNov 2012

Macro advise: read a lot of material similar to what you hope to write. Write a lot, you only get better with practice. Collaborate with a good editor.

Books: The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Shertzer's The Elements of Grammar, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

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bookofjoeFeb 2024

That may be the result of the "New York Times Manual of Style and Usage."

For example, the Times NEVER uses a lower case "i" when iPhone begins a headline or sentence or picture caption.

It is always "IPhone"

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vivegiMay 2023

It is ironic that The New York Time Manual of Style and Usage [1] cited by the article as one of the authoritative sources often doesn't follow its own style guide. A Google search for "comprised of" in nytimes.com [2] gives around 4600+ results. A cursory glance at the first page of search results and the snippet text in the results all look fine.

I guess, we could say, much ado about nothing.

[1]: Siegal, Allan (1999). The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. Three Rivers Press. p. 80.

[2]: Google search query for site:nytimes.com containing "comprised of". URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22comprised+of%22+site%3Any...

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NoRelToEmberMay 2023

Per the stylebooks of the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and others [1], whether one is an immigrant or minority is only pertinent in heartwarming stories such as this. Quoting directly from the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 2015 Edition [2]:

race should be cited only when it is pertinent and its pertinence is clear to the reader. The race of a victim of a hate crime or the subject of a police search is clearly germane, an essential part of the person’s description. But the race of a person convicted of a crime is not pertinent unless the case has racial overtones; if it does, the overtones should be explained.

[1] https://sincerity.net/stylebooks/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manual_of_S...

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cratermoonJun 2022

As both a writer and an editor, tools like this are essential. Most writing is done in the context of an organization, like a publication or company. Those organizations have style rules. Rules for things like US or UK spelling, for usage questions where there is no single correct answer. Maybe they start with the Chicago Manual of Style, but add custom rules. Maybe it's the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. It's just like a style checker for code. It frees writers and editors from having to worry about details to focus on the important and difficult aspects of writing.

What details? Things like "do you use 's for possessives even for a word/name ending in s, or is it s'?" or "oxford comma or no?". Writers argue over these just like programmers argue over tabs v spaces or the place of braces. Sure, if you're just blogging for personal use, go crazy, don't worry about a consistent style, do what you want. When writing for publication, instead of arguing over whether or not it's ok to use certain slang or contractions, the editors just chose a preferred way.

Tools like Vale streamline the process of aligning to a style, just like coding style checkers and autoformatters relieve programmers of the tedium fixing up all the indentation manually.

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