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).
As many of you know by now, the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style was published last September. To find out what’s new, you can check out “What’s New in the 18th Edition?” But now there’s an even better way to learn what’s new—by taking our quizzes.
A little more than three years ago, we introduced The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt, the proofreading software that works with Microsoft Word. That initial release was based on the 17th edition of the Manual, and it wasn’t too long before the teams at Chicago and PerfectIt began working on an update that would coincide with the publication of the 18th.
As we announced back in April, the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will be published in September. That’s the official publication month for the printed book, and copies have already started rolling off the presses. But if you subscribe to CMOS Online, you don’t have to wait any longer.
Have you heard the news? The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will be published in September! And . . . it’s YELLOW! It may seem hard to believe, but it’s been seven years since we published the 17th edition.
We hate to do this, but the next paragraph is going to contain errors. Microsoft Word won’t catch any of them. How many can you count?
Variant spellings take a toll on editors everywhere. The minutes tick away whenever we leave our documents (as we often do) in search of the answer to that age-old question: What’s the preferred spelling of this word?
Italics can be applied for various reasons, but it is always with the same goal: to mark text as different in some way. This difference can be a matter of emphasis, or it can indicate the title of a book or movie or other work, the scientific name of a species, or the name of a court case, among other things.
Though capitalization can depend on context, there are some general rules that will apply most of the time. Proper nouns and adjectives—including the names of people, places, and brands—are almost always capitalized.
Editors spend a lot of time making decisions related to hyphens. That’s because hyphenation depends not only on accepted usage but also on context—and sometimes on both.
