We’re back with another Halloween quiz—this time with a dash of Chicago style sprinkled on top of the trivia. Whether you celebrate this DIY holiday or not, we hope you’ll find something here to satisfy your craving for editorial arcana.
The first edition of The Chicago Manual of Style was published in 1906, when horses outnumbered cars and typewriters and telephones had only recently become fixtures of the modern office. Yet the books and articles published back then weren’t all that different from the ones published today, and a lot of the advice in the original Manual still applies.
What does Halloween have to do with Chicago style? Not a lot, but that hasn’t stopped us from coming up with ten questions designed to challenge your editorial knowledge and stoke your curiosity about this quirky holiday and some of the words associated with it.
If you’ve been following the stories in the media about the ongoing pandemic, you’ve probably seen both “COVID-19” and “Covid-19.” Which version is correct, and which one is Chicago style?
To celebrate the end of another decade, we’ve put together eleven questions designed to test your knowledge of some random editorial facts.
Okay, so you’re an editor or proofreader who knows Chicago style, but now you need to follow AP. Or you’re a student, and you need MLA for one project and Chicago (or Turabian) for the next—and APA after that. . . .
On a scale of 1 to 10, can you guess how big a stickler you are? (Your friends and colleagues probably can.) Just for fun, measure your peeving profile with this quiz.
In response to reader questions and requests, the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has a new paragraph (8.185) called “Titles of Folktales, Fables, Nursery Rhymes, and the Like.” The new guidelines suggest that
At paragraph 6.42, the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style notes that a direct question is sometimes included within a sentence but not enclosed in quotation marks. When such a question comes in the middle of a sentence, it is usually introduced by a comma, and (this is the new part) it
At paragraph 6.20, the 17th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style notes that the abbreviation etc. (et cetera, literally “and others of the same kind”) and such equivalents as and so forth and and the like are preceded by a comma. In a slight departure from previous editions of CMOS, such expressions are
