Manual on Usage & Style [Mass Market Paperback]

Texas Law Review (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 90 pages
• Publisher: Texas Law Review Association; 8 edition (1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 187867451X
• ISBN-13: 978-1878674517
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 4.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,458,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but not great, May 23, 2002

By 

Wayne Schiess (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manual on Usage & Style (Mass Market Paperback)

I teach at the law school that sponsors the Texas Law Review--which publishes this Manual on Usage and Style. We fondly refer to it as "the MOUS." It's a handy legal-style manual, with good advice on many subjects, including capitalization, commonly misused words, and punctuation. But there are two main drawbacks.

First, it is not comprehensive enough to be the only style manual a lawyer or law student uses. With 90 very small pages (the dimensions are 4.5 inches by 6) it can't possibly cover all the important legal style matters--and it doesn't. You (and the Texas Law Review, for that matter) should adopt a comprehensive legal style manual--and there are several to choose from.

Second, it's sometimes arbitrary. For example: "When organizing ideas expressed in separate sentences into a numerical sequence, use first, second, third, . . . last (or finally)." Why not first, second, third, fourth? Neither method is clearly better, yet the MOUS arbitrarily prefers to start with ordinals and end with non-numerical text.