With this month’s workout, you get another chance to test your knowledge of Chicago style versus AP. Whether you know both styles or only one of them, a comparison is a good way to sharpen your skills.
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.
Switching to italics for the occasional word or phrase borrowed from another language—and not listed in a standard English-language dictionary—can be helpful to readers.
In our Fiction+ series, we set out to help CMOS users adapt Chicago style to creative writing contexts. Sometimes, Chicago’s general guidelines already work just fine; other times, they need a little noodge to sit comfortably on a page of fiction.
Some editors spend most of their time following a single style. But many of us, especially if we freelance, are required to know more than one.
Editors are never happy. First they throw a fit if you send in a manuscript without page numbers, but once you send them a paginated work, they complain when you try to discuss a sentence on page 67.
Its generic name is the serial (or series) comma, but a lot of people refer to it by a fancier name: Oxford comma.
When we think about writing numbers, we tend to think of research papers, financial reports, sports columns, and other quantity-laden nonfiction settings. But novelists and playwrights and poets also puzzle over how to style numbers.
This month’s Chicago style workout focuses on the fourth and last section of our hyphenation table, “Words Formed with Prefixes.”
Anyone who learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard would be excused for thinking the semicolon is the most important mark of punctuation in English; why else would it be sitting right there on the home row?
In 1929, when the song “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” became a big hit, composers Thomas “Fats” Waller and Harry Brooks probably weren’t too worried about that final apostrophe.
To celebrate the end of another decade, we’ve put together eleven questions designed to test your knowledge of some random editorial facts.
What exactly is the past perfect? And what’s wrong with using it?
Chicago style doesn’t require commas when “Jr.” or “Sr.” follows a name. Until just a few decades ago, however, commas were the norm.
Welcome to our second “Chicago Style” crossword puzzle. The theme this time is specialty publishing.
