Fully updated for 2000, all aspects of the game are covered in detail, including: etiquette, striking the ball, how to decide ties, order of plays, handicap allowances, and rules of amateur status.

The essence of the Rules of Golf is simple...play the course as you find it and play the ball as it lies. However, given golf is played all over the world where the climate, topography and course conditions vary greatly, there are a myriad of situations that can happen when playing golf and players need to know how to deal with those. The Official Guide to the Rules of Golf is the Bible of Golf Rules. This edition is fully updated to include amendments that come into play from January 2023. The first section of the book contains the Rules of Golf with Clarifications, where the Clarifications provide additional explanations and in many cases examples to help the reader understand the more complex scenarios. The second section, titled "Committee Procedures", contains practical guidance for those involved in running day to day play at golf courses or running competitions at all levels of the game.

"The cry for the simplification of the Rules of Golf is a stock-in-trade of the journalist during the winter months. Countless words on the subject have been poured out to an ever-tolerant public, but still the long-sought simplification does not come."—Henry Longhurst, 1937 The hopes of renowned writer and golfer Henry Longhurst—and millions of golfers before and after him—have finally been realized. In The Rules of Golf in Plain English, Bryan A. Garner, American English language and usage expert, and Jeffrey S. Kuhn, volunteer USGA rules official, have translated the knotty Rules with the encouragement and permission of the United States Golf Association. The result is a modern, readable version that offers, for the first time, clear guidance to both amateurs and professionals. Based on a 338-word set of thirteen rules written in 1744, the official Rules have grown, over two and a half centuries, to 40,000 words. Numerous contributors and a complex revision process have rendered these Rules so opaque and stylistically inconsistent that a companion volume—the 600-page Decisions on the Rules of Golf—has been published to help golfers navigate them. Both lawyers and avid golfers, Kuhn and Garner recognized the difficulties that the language of the Rules of Golf created, especially in a sport that expects players to call penalties on themselves. By reworking the Rules line by line, word by word, they have produced an accessible resource that no golfer—from the duffer to the pro—should be without.

A world list of books in the English language.