Hart's Rules
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Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford is a reference book and style guide first published in England by Oxford University Press in 1893. Its modern edition retitled The Oxford Guide to Style (OGS) in 2002 from which New Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for Writers and Editors was adapted in 2005 has been promoted as "Hart's Rules for the 21st Century".
[edit] Publishing history
Written by Horace Hart, then Controller of the University Press, it was originally intended as a concise in-house style guide for the staff of Oxford University Press, but soon gained wider use as a source for authoritative instructions on typesetting style, grammar, punctuation, and usage.
In February 2002 Oxford University Press published a new and much longer edition (the fortieth) of Hart's Rules under the title The Oxford Guide to Style, with the marketing slogan "Hart's Rules for the 21st Century", although it is of more value to editors than to typesetters.
The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors is a companion volume intended for the general writer rather than the typesetter. It was originally written as the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary by Frederick Howard Collins in 1905, and renamed in 1983.
The Oxford Style Manual (2003) combines The Oxford Guide to Style with a revised Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. It again contains considerably more information about editing style than Hart's Rules did, but also less about typography.
These Oxford publications may be very loosely regarded as the nearest UK equivalents of the US works The Elements of Style ("Strunk & White") and The Chicago Manual of Style. However, none of these works corresponds exactly to the others. Strunk and White mainly covers "good" English usage – thus corresponding more closely to works such as Fowler's Modern English Usage (published over many years – again by Oxford University Press – under various similar titles). The Chicago Manual of Style does not include a dictionary, as it expects users to refer to the Webster dictionaries.
New Hart's Rules (adapted from The Oxford Guide to Style) was published by Oxford University Press in September 2005.
