Tag: Chicago Manual of Style

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Why there will always be a Chicago Manual of Style

From their droll Q&A.

screen-shot-2016-12-06-at-4-58-33-pmQ. A sentence in a manuscript: In a landmark collection of essays, The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of “King Lear,” a range of scholars made the case . . . The book title is of course in italics—but then how does one treat that comma after Lear, and then the quote mark after the comma? Would the comma be in roman, and then the quote mark in italics?

A. This situation is a sticky wicket. The quotation marks must be italic, since they are both part of an italic book title. But the comma doesn’t belong to the title. According to Chicago’s preference for putting punctuation into the same font as the “surrounding text” (6.5), the comma would be roman. But this comma is “surrounded” by italics! If only we could use “logical punctuation,” whereby the comma would go outside the quotation marks, to render the issue moot. But that would be un-American. Editors here disagree on the best solution, so style the comma as you wish with the hope that its tiny size will allow readers to ignore it.

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Modest Pleasures: The CMOS Q&A on Grammar Zombie Rules

The Chicago Manual of Style puts out a monthly Q&A that is both droll, and well punctuated.  One of this month’s questions sent me scrambling to Google, where I found, to my shock, that it is okay to do many of the things that unhinged my 9th grade English teacher.

The query in question:

Q. In the August Q&A, you did not correct the correspondent’s misuse of the word entitled (“a poster authored with Smith entitled ‘Measuring . . .’”). Were you just being kind, or did you not want to distract from the question being asked?

A. You might prefer the more economical word title in your own writing, but entitle is widely used, and many writers think it makes a better verb. The belief that entitle must not be used in place of title is one of many spurious “zombie rules” clung to by writers and editors and teachers. If you Google “grammar superstitions” or “grammar zombie rules,” you might be surprised at how many of your own habits are out of date!

I did just that and found the Baltimore Sun, no less, giving up the ghost on “who” and “whom,” being (too) tolerant of lapses in observing the distinction between “which” and “that,” and (sort of) smiling on the use of they/their as singular. Oh the horror!  This from John E. McIntyre, a past president of the American Copy Editors Society!

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The Government Printing Office Style Manual of yesteryear, when rules were rules, and no infinitives were ever split.