Italics for Non-English Words in Fiction
Switching to italics for the occasional word or phrase borrowed from another language—and not listed in a standard English-language dictionary—can be helpful to readers.
Formatting Text Messages in Fiction
In our Fiction+ series, we set out to help CMOS users adapt Chicago style to creative writing contexts. Sometimes, Chicago’s general guidelines already work just fine; other times, they need a little noodge to sit comfortably on a page of fiction.
Chicago Style Workout 42: Chicago vs. AP
This workout is the first in a series designed to test your knowledge of Chicago style relative to another popular and widely used style—in this case, AP.
When Page Numbers Don’t Help
Editors are never happy. First they throw a fit if you send in a manuscript without page numbers, but once you send them a paginated work, they complain when you try to discuss a sentence on page 67.
Oxford, Chicago, and the Serial Comma
Its generic name is the serial (or series) comma, but a lot of people refer to it by a fancier name: Oxford comma.
Numbers in Creative Writing
When we think about writing numbers, we tend to think of research papers, financial reports, sports columns, and other quantity-laden nonfiction settings. But novelists and playwrights and poets also puzzle over how to style numbers.
Chicago Style Workout 41: Prefixes
This workout focuses on the fourth and last section of our hyphenation table, “Words Formed with Prefixes.” You’ll find the hyphenation table under paragraph 7.96 in CMOS 18.
Semicolons in Fiction
Anyone who learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard would be excused for thinking the semicolon is the most important mark of punctuation in English; why else would it be sitting right there on the home row?
“Ain’t Misbehavin’ ”: When Quotation Marks and Apostrophes Collide
In 1929, when the song “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” became a big hit, composers Thomas “Fats” Waller and Harry Brooks probably weren’t too worried about that final apostrophe in the song’s title.
What Does an Editor Know? A Quiz
To celebrate the end of another decade, we’ve put together eleven questions designed to test your knowledge of some random editorial facts.
