The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A has been posting answers to your questions since way back in 1997, when it was known as the “FAQ (and not so FAQ).” Most of these questions and answers have remained online, in a free, searchable archive that has grown to more than a third of a million words.
Copyeditors typically work in Microsoft Word or Google Docs or the like, making and suggesting changes directly in the document, which at that stage is still referred to as a manuscript. Proofreaders come in at a later stage, after the manuscript has been converted and formatted for publication in a program like Adobe InDesign.
In publications that follow Chicago style, commas and periods are placed before a closing quotation mark, “like this,” rather than after, “like this”. This convention has persisted even though it’s no longer universally followed outside the United States and isn’t entirely logical.
Chicago’s main system for citing sources consists of numbered footnotes or endnotes and, usually, a corresponding list of sources in a bibliography.
It hasn’t reflected publishing standards since the Jazz Age. And it isn’t Chicago style. But some people continue to do it in their own documents—from manuscripts to emails. You’ll even see it occasionally on social media.
Peter B. Kaufman is Associate Director of Development at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge (Seven Stories Press, 2021) and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world.
The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A first went online in 1997. According to a page from June of that year at the Wayback Machine, one early question was about submitting manuscripts on disk, which back then usually meant the 3.5-inch “floppy” variety. Another question concerned the spelling of online (which was still hyphenated, though we had a hunch that the hyphen wouldn’t last).
Commas, like the two in this sentence, often come in pairs. When they do, they’re usually acting like miniature parentheses. In fact, whenever you’re tempted to omit the second of two commas, convert them both to parentheses; if your text still works as intended, keep that second comma.
Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022.
As many of you know by now, the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style was published last September. To find out what’s new, you can check out “What’s New in the 18th Edition?” But now there’s an even better way to learn what’s new—by taking our quizzes.
A little more than three years ago, we introduced The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt, the proofreading software that works with Microsoft Word. That initial release was based on the 17th edition of the Manual, and it wasn’t too long before the teams at Chicago and PerfectIt began working on an update that would coincide with the publication of the 18th.
The convention of hyphenating a compound modifier before a noun but not after—as in a well-known author versus an author who is well known—has been Chicago style since the first edition (published in 1906).
Anyone who’s familiar with contemporary English-language novels would have little trouble reading a novel published in the 1700s in an original edition. By the middle of that century, conventions related to printed text and punctuation were starting to look almost modern.
As we announced back in April, the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will be published in September. That’s the official publication month for the printed book, and copies have already started rolling off the presses. But if you subscribe to CMOS Online, you don’t have to wait any longer.
Have you heard the news? The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will be published in September! And . . . it’s YELLOW! It may seem hard to believe, but it’s been seven years since we published the 17th edition.
