Customer Reviews

The Oxford Guide to Style

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Though some may believe that this guide is only for editors, publishers and writers, I insist that anyone who takes pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) buy this book. Clear and helpful, "The Oxford Guide to Style" (I know that this should be italicized, but Amazon.com doesn't seem to process HTML) logically breaks down stylistic and grammatical information. The lengthy index adds to the book's ease-of-use. Every section is clearly titled and arranged in neat paragraphs.

The only problem that I found was in the foreign language section: the guide neglects to insert a space before colons, semicolons, question marks and exclamation marks in the French section.

This is interesting to read or skim, and I continue to use it as a reference.

The contents of this book is good. It really is a good companion to my Chicago Manual of Style, outlining the British way of doing things in text composition. The book has a reasonable structure which, however, in parts is confusing.

Chapter 11 (Languages) is organized in a rather confusing manner. The subsections list languages or language groups alphabetically, without a clear system. For example, each of the Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German) and of the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish) is listed separately, in the alphabetical sequence (Dutch under D, German under G, French under F etc.) The Scandinavian languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic) are grouped together, though, and listed undr S. Baltic and Slavonic languages are also grouped together. Catalan is listed under Spanish and Iberian languages (S), but has also its own section under C. Russian has a separate entry while all other Slavonic languages are grouped together. Also, a language such as Romanian (20 million speakers) is discussed on two pages while all Slavonic languages (Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Serbian and Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian and Ukrainian -- with a total community of some 120 million speakers) are given only four pages altogether. Altogether, the section on languages provides basic information regarding alphabets used, but for many languages, information on typographic conventions (hyphenation, quotation marks, dashes etc.) is badly missing, so the information gathered cannot be considered sufficient as a guideline for typesetting in a foreign language.

The typography of the book is a critical element that must be mentioned. My personal view is that a book about writing and composition should be particularly well-designed itself. The format is handy (better than Chicago Manual of Style) and the page layout is practical and elegant. However, the impression is ruined by the most awkward choice of typefaces: the excellent book and newspaper typeface Swift (designed by Gerard Unger) is paired with... Arial!

The title page, the headings, the captions and the examples are all typeset using on of the the dullest, ugliest sanserif typefaces ever designed. Arial lacks character and individuality, as it was conceived by its makers (the Monotype company) as a substitute for Helvetica (made by Monotype's competitor, Linotype). Arial was drawn to match Helvetica's character width but to have slightly altered letter appearance. The result is a set of letterforms that, indeed, look like imitation of something else. Since nowadays, Arial is included on practically all personal computers, one cannot imagine a choice for a typeface that would be less original. But it's not necessarily the lack of originality that disqualitfies Arial as a typeface suitable for this sort of book. Arial simply has poorly drawn letterforms, and the Black variant (used on the title page, section titles and in the running headers of each page) is simply ugly. Practically any other grotesque (sanserif) typeface would have been a better choice for this book.

The lack of imagination in the typesetting of the book is best evident on the title page. The starting "T" in the first line has been shifted left to optically align with the line below, the text below has not. The word "Guide" drifts too far to the right, the three lines below drift progressively to the left. Aligning the text neatly would have taken less than a minute of someone's time.

Overall, the book is a credible effort but not up to the standards that you might expect from a "standard work" from Oxford University Press.