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).
At that time, the Q&A was called the “FAQ (and not so FAQ).” We knew from the start that our forum wouldn’t be limited to frequently asked questions; any question about editorial style would be welcome. Today, our free online feature has grown to rival CMOS itself, with a searchable archive of more than two thousand question-and-answer pairs across forty categories.
That’s a lot to navigate, so we’ve added a new category here at Shop Talk designed to highlight information from the Q&A that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. For this first post, we’ve dug up some tricks that writers and editors might find useful.*
We hope these encourage you to do some digging around of your own.
Grammar Checker Toggle
Writers have been contending with Microsoft Word’s squiggly red underlines longer than there’s been a CMOS Online Q&A. Those are for spelling errors. More recently, Word’s double-blue underlines—part of its grammar check—have joined in.
Many of us have learned to depend on the spelling reminders, but grammar is more subjective than spelling. Is there an easy way to switch it off when you don’t want to see it (and then on again when you do)? That wasn’t the focus of a recent question, but it was a subtheme, so we added this tip:
Tip: To avoid falling under the influence of Word’s blue underlines, some writers prefer to toggle them off as they draft. A convenient way of doing this is to add a button to the ribbon. In Word for Windows (the desktop version), go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon. Then select All Commands under “Choose commands from” and scroll down until you find Hide Grammar Errors. You can then add that command to a new group under the Home tab (or wherever you want it to appear). Steps for Word for Mac will be similar.
If you use the option under Customize Ribbon to assign a keyboard shortcut to the equivalent command (look for ToolsGrammarHide under the All Commands category in the separate dialog box for keyboard shortcuts), keep the button, which has the important advantage of showing whether it’s on or off (via shading/outline).
You can do the same thing for the spelling checker if you want to; the equivalent commands are Hide Spelling Errors (for the button) and ToolsSpellingHide (for the keyboard shortcut). Just be very sure not to accidentially leave one of them off—oops, that’s accidentally—or you may be fooled into missing your own errors. (As the tip suggests, that button provides crucial feedback.)
Unicode Charts
All characters are special, from A to z and 0 to 9. But to qualify as a special character, a letter or symbol needs to be something more than that. The Greek letter α qualifies—that’s an alpha—as does its capitalized counterpart, Α. But as that Greek capital alpha illustrates, it’s not always easy to tell what you’re dealing with: In many fonts a Greek capital alpha looks just like an ordinary Latin capital letter A.
One of our correspondents recently asked us about this problem, and we replied with an answer that focused on the multiplication sign, or ×. You can revisit our answer for tips on how to analyze special characters in both MS Word and Google Docs.
The surest way of identifying an ambiguous character in Word or Docs is to use the software to determine its unique hexadecimal code point—i.e., its Unicode number. The code point for the multiplication sign is 00D7 (hexadecimals have a base of sixteen, meaning that they use the ten digits 0–9 and the six letters A–F).
For the multiplication sign, simply enter 00D7 into the box at the top of the page for the latest Unicode Character Code Charts to begin your adventures down the rabbit hole of special characters and symbols. See also CMOS 11.2.
HTML Fractions
Unicode includes symbols for more than a dozen common fractions (or what it calls vulgar fractions), including ¼, ½, and ¾. Fractions that aren’t included can be typed with a slash, as in 1/72. But it doesn’t look all that great to write 2½ in one place and 3 1/72 in another.
One of our readers asked us about this conundrum (see the Q&A here). Fortunately, there’s a solution. As explained in our answer, you can use a special kind of slash:
One approach that can work in HTML (which is what you’re viewing right now) is to use a fraction slash (U+2044) instead of an ordinary forward slash (U+002F, the character that shares a key with the question mark on English-language QWERTY keyboards).
Unlike the forward slash, the fraction slash is designed to kern tightly to any character immediately before or after it. Best of all, the numbers before and after the slash will automatically go into fraction mode, adjusting their size and position relative to the slash (though not in all fonts).
For example, you could use this approach for both 1/2 and 1/72, which will look like this: 1⁄2 and 1⁄72. Easy, right? Just don’t try it in MS Word or Google Docs. It’s an HTML-only trick.
One thing not addressed in our answer: With Unicode’s fractions, you don’t need to add a space between the fraction and a number that precedes it, as in 2½ (cf. 3 1/72). But you will need to add a space next to a fraction made with the fraction slash, or the number before the fraction will become part of the numerator. To keep the fraction from breaking over a line, you can use a narrow nonbreaking space (U+202F), as in 2 1⁄2 or 3 1⁄72 (see also CMOS 6.127, 6.128, and 6.129).
For more on fractions, including fractions in mathematical contexts, see CMOS 9.15, 9.16, and 9.17.
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We’ll be back with more from the Q&A archives soon. Until then, don’t overlook the Q&A tab in the search results at CMOS Online. A search for any of the three subheads above—“HTML Fractions,” “Grammar Checker Toggle,” and “Unicode Charts”—should return useful results (under FAQ ITEM or TOPIC Q&A LIST), including the archived answers covered in this post.
And don’t forget to check back each month for new questions and answers at the Q&A. If you haven’t already, you can sign up for our free monthly Q&A Alerts.
* In 2019 we updated the entire Q&A archive to be in line with the 17th edition, published in 2017; more recent answers (the ones toward the top of each category) refer to the 18th edition (2024). Though most answers remain accurate regardless of edition, we’ll note edition-dependent discrepancies for these posts where relevant.
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