Customer Reviews

Harbrace College Handbook : With 1998 MLA Style Manual Updates, 13th Revised Edition (Hodges Harbrace Handbook)

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3 star:		(2)
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This is the Revised Brief Thirteenth edition, not the full edition. The paperback version comes with a plastic ring binder that is not suitable for heavy use. In short, this is not the version that a professional editor would want, although it might be fine for students.

The only reference you will need for everyday professional and proper usage of the English language. Very well organized and extremely easy to use. I highly recommend this book.

The Harbrace, though sometimes hard to come by, is THE college reference handbook. An EXCELLENT gift for high school graduates. A great source of reference for all those times when students need help outside the classroom. I even taught out of it when doing my T.A. in English 100. I can't say enough good about it. Don't try to write papers without it.

I found this book to be a wonderful reference when writing anything from a short paper to a forty page research paper. Neither would have been possible without this text. A great buy!

Bigger and newer is not always better. In my estimation, The Revised 13th Edition of the Harbrace College Handbook is inferior to its predecessors. Indeed, I was so disappointed that I gave the book to a friend and hunted for an 11th Edition instead.

There are three defects that make the 13th Edition less useful as a reference work:

(1) The 'highlight' color in the 13th Edition is blue; in previous editions* Harbrace used RED as its highlight color (for such things as exact location of punctuation or to present succinct rules of proper usage). The red really popped from the surrounding black text; the blue--a fairly dark shade--has such low contrast that they might as well have used black.

[*I used the 8th, 9th, and 11th Editions when I was a college teacher and tutor (including work with ESL students). As a writer, I later relied on the 11th Harbrace as my principal desk reference for two decades. The 11th Edition was perfect for my needs, but my copy was destroyed in a fire.]

(2) The 'reference tabs' in the 13th Edition are markedly inferior. Formerly, the Harbrace had red reference tabs printed along the edge of the book (opposite the spine). The tabs were not physically-cut 'thumb tabs' but worked in much the same way. They were offset from each other; the visual seperation made it easy to find the exact section. It was rapid and instinctive: Run a thumb down the edge of the book, find the tab, and flip to the section.

The 13th Edition, however, locates the tabs across the TOP of the book, and without any offsets. The location along the top is especially awkward: The user must now re-grasp the book and/or turn it 90 degrees to use the tabs along the top. Moreover, the lack of offsets means that there are no visual clues to aid the user in finding the section; the user must thumb across a completely undifferentiated band of blue.

(3) Because so much additional material has been crammed into it, the 13th edition is thicker, bulkier, and heavier in the hand. There are new 'sidebar' boxes for ESL users, the MLA Style Manual (and another used by psychologists), expansions to cover new technologies (e.g., e-mail), and a mass of additional material on research, critical thinking, teaching exercises for students, essay tests, term papers, and so on ad infinitum. These have potential utility for college students--it IS a 'College Handbook' after all--but it diminishes the Harbrace as handy desk reference for post-college users. Non-college users will find much that is superfluous; I will hazard that perhaps one-quarter of the Handbook is for 'college-only' users.

Perhaps I'm being cranky: I was very disappointed when I saw the changes from the earlier editions that I knew and liked. Let me close, therefore, with some praise.

Like the earlier versions, the 13th Harbrace College Handbook is a comprehensive Owner's Manual to the English language. It remains a superb choice for college students. For them, it may well be superior to earlier editions (despite the flawed highlight color and awkward reference tabs). If you are NOT a college student, however, look for an earlier edition.*

[* I have not seen the 12th Edition. I know that the 11th Edition and its predecessors are thoroughly excellent.]

Two or three millenia ago, when I first began college, the assigned handbook was the Harbrace, then in the second or third edition. Since then I have ben a military officer, a professional writer, a manager, and a teacher. Through each of these incarnations I have had the Harbrace at my elbow. I have never failed to find exactly the right advice, the right emphasis, and even the right choices to make my writing eminently readable.
Although its style is not didactic, it does present enough examples to keep both the old and the new writer from wandering off into that muddy stuff we se so often in magazines.
Buy one! That and a Strunk and White are all you need.

No writer can afford to be without this one! An excellent resource for all the grammatical rules you've forgotten since high school. I keep this beside my computer as I write.

I had an edition in the 1950's when I was in college, then bought the updated 5th edition in the 1960's. I have newer, bulkier books like _Chicago Manual_ of Style but for conciseness, correctness and convenience this little book is still my favorite. My advice, get an older edition if you can find it. My little book can fit in a large pocket, yet it is complete.

John Culleton

Harbrace book rocks. The book was read by me and I like it. Theirs a good part when the book talked about how to not split infiitivs and I like that also, however, do'nt by this book if your all ready nice at writing, like me! C' YA.