9 changes to the Chicago Manual of Style, and why they matter
The Chicago Manual of Style: 18th Edition
By the University of Chicago Press Editorial Staff
University of Chicago Press. 1,200 pp. $75
Since its first edition, in 1906, The Chicago Manual of Style has been a vital reference for every book and magazine editor. The AP Stylebook guides many newspapers—though not the Washington Post, which has its own. (And let us not discuss stylebook differences; times are fractious enough.)
The Chicago manual’s rules are meant not only for those of us who write and edit for a living but for anyone who writes and edits, which is to say everyone.
Every seven years or so, Chicago comes out with a new edition, responding to changes in practice. This month it publishes its 18th. Its editors do not make changes idly. They scour numerous sources to ensure that their advice represents the most current usage of words, punctuation and format among published works. A new Chicago provides an opportunity to assess changes in language and publishing: Since the 17th edition arrived in 2017, for example, Chicago has fully (if perhaps wearily) embraced the singular “they” (including even “themself,” as in “each should serve themself”). The 18th also includes new guidance about electronic and self-publishing, about the use of AI, about accessibility of text and images (for example, when authors must disclose AI use, and what kind of alternative text should be included to describe an image for the vision-impaired).
Here are a few other changes Chicago has codified in its new edition:
• Be aware of the colon: If what follows is a complete sentence, capitalize the first letter of that sentence.
• Esports and ebook now need no hyphens, like email, which lost its hyphen in the previous edition.
• Chicago will never be fashion forward, but you may now hyphenate certain compound modifiers, like ill-advised and wild-eyed (though not, say, fashion forward), even when they appear after the noun they modify. This will always be confusing—the emerald-green tie was emerald green—but Chicago has 14 pages of hyphenation tables to guide you.
• Prepositions of five or more letters are now capitalized in headlines: Words into Type, but Much Ado About Nothing.
• Overly no longer seems overly weird; you can use it.
• Indigenous joins Black and White in capitalization.
• Look, it’s Halley’s Comet, with a brand-new uppercase “C”!
• If you simply must, you may begin a sentence with a year. But you can smoothly write around that, can’t you? Surely you can.
• A TV sitcom, Abbott Elementary, is italicized, but individual episodes take quotation marks. Now, web-only series following the track of Letterkenny or Drunk History don’t have to wait for network adoption before they earn their italics.
The “style” on which Chicago advises is not whether you use too many adjectives or should consider shorter paragraphs. For such matters, turn to Orwell or Strunk and White. Those regard the artistry of the published word; Chicago is the operations manual. To copy editors it is beloved almost beyond measure, the rock on which is founded their church of rectitude (perhaps less rock than cinder block—the new edition is 1,200 pages, 2½ inches thick).
I made Chicago’s acquaintance when I applied to copy-edit for a technology publisher in the 1980s. They gave me a test to take home, and I was urged to use Chicago as my authority. A copy of the 13th edition came home with me from the bookstore.
For that test, I referred to a page in the 13th that showed how to use copy-editing marks: the caret that pointed to an added word and showed where to add it; the delete symbol, a mysterious squiggle connected to letters or words to be removed. An angled slash through a letter told the compositor to change an uppercase letter to lowercase, and you carried the change forward by continuing the line above text like a long division sign; conversely, three lines beneath a lowercase letter or phrase signaled to capitalize it. You drew attention to an added period by circling it like a target; an added comma wore a little caret hat, as did a semicolon; an added colon, circled, looked like a traffic light. To add space we used a symbol we called an octothorpe, long before it became known as a hashtag. This felt like mastering hieroglyphics or secret Masonic rites.
Copy-editing was work of not just intellectual but sensory joy. We edited pages of typescript with enormous margins on all four sides. We corrected errors and excised mistakes with crisp strokes from exquisitely sharpened blue pencils whose shavings I can smell to this day. The writers used brown pencil to correct errors they noted in the typescript. We wrote queries in those copious margins, circling them—the universal symbol for “do not typeset.”
We returned the typescript to the writers. They used green pencil to make emendations to our blue ones, though as copy editors we had the final say on matters of grammar, usage and style. Blue trumped both brown and green, the compositors knew.
We delighted in such arcana. We used “stet,” Latin for “let it stand,” to tell the compositor to ignore certain editing marks and go back to the original. One underline meant italics, and tiny vertical bars through that underline meant “Oops, I changed my mind, don’t use italics at all.” You could circle “set Rom” if you were concerned that the compositor might get confused. Once in a while, the compositor would call us back: “Help me follow this habitrail,” she would say, and somebody would trot back to the women who sat, typing, in front of large computer terminals. One was encouraged to treat the compositors as women with significant magic, which they were, though now that we all turn in work that is composited on our own keyboards, their breed has all but vanished.
The 18th edition still has a page dedicated to those thrilling copy-editing marks, and it discusses how they differ from proofreading marks, even though as publishing has migrated from page to electron, both proofreaders and copy editors threaten to follow compositors into history. Chicago faces reality: The new edition no longer suggests the lightly dismissive citation “self-published,” switching to “published by the author,” as that practice has grown in volume and diminished in suspicion.
The Chicago Manual is of course available online, but it resolutely publishes a book, just as its pages refuse to abandon its paper-and-pencil history. A reference book is a belief system: There is a right way. Its changing rules and traditions can be known; you can keep them near you. At a time when right ways, rules and traditions are everywhere uncertain, a new Chicago provides, for at least a moment, solid ground.
Scott Huler, the author of seven books of nonfiction, including A Delicious Country, is the senior staff writer for Duke Magazine. His radio work has been heard on “All Things Considered,” “Marketplace” and “Splendid Table.”
