When we saw the beautiful graphics recently in the Washington Post that Princeton neuroscientist Adam J. Calhoun created from famous works, we couldn’t help but wonder how The Chicago Manual of Style would hold up under the same scrutiny.

Adam was kind enough to give our chapter 6 of CMOS (“Punctuation”) his treatment. First, he extracted everything but the punctuation:

Then, using assigned colors for the various punctuation marks, he created a “heat map.” Behold the glory of Chicago punctuation!

How about that dashing green stripe! Anyone care to identify it? And how do you think we stack up next to Joyce? Shakespeare? Wittgenstein?

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