Section 6.38 in the Spotlight
CMOS receives regular queries from readers asking whether greetings like “Hi, Elsa” really need that comma. Especially in e-mail messages, we hear, it looks fussy. And it takes so long to type!
For Freelancer Editors: How to Set Fees
Anyone who has something to sell faces a dilemma when it comes to deciding on a price: ask too much and no one will buy; ask too little and you won’t earn enough money. In freelance editing, the second option carries an added danger: ask too little and you could be swamped with competing deadlines.
Peter Sokolowski at Merriam-Webster Dictionary talks about a billion “lookups” a year
Would you play Scrabble against this man? Peter Sokolowski is editor at large at Merriam-Webster, where he works on the Word of the Day podcast, Ask the Editor videos, articles about word trends and etymologies—and serves as pronouncer for spelling bees around the world. Editor Carol Saller asks him about Merriam-Webster’s billion lookups each year.
Facing the new year with resolve
What do you resolve for 2016? Comments are open—feel free to share!
Robert Alter talks about translating the Hebrew Bible
CMOS: You have now translated a large portion of the Hebrew Bible into English. What motivated you to take on such an enormous, high-profile, high-stakes project?
The Editor’s Toughest Challenge
In my view, the most regrettable copyediting disasters come in the form of errors introduced by the editor. Letting a writer’s original mistake survive is certainly cause for regret, but nothing’s worse than knowing that the work was correct until you messed it up!
Section 13.7 in the Spotlight
A good rule of thumb is that changes to quotations are not permitted, period. So much is at stake when we present the words of someone else, whether spoken or written, and responsibility lies with the quoter to render what was said accurately and in a fair context. The actual wording of the quotation must be reproduced exactly. Yet CMOS 13.7 lists half a dozen things that are OK to change when quoting.
Learning from Comics: Matt Upson and Mike Hall talk about teaching research through graphic novels
Matt Upson, assistant professor and director of library undergraduate services at Oklahoma State University, and C. Michael Hall (Mike) Hall, a writer, cartoonist, and public speaker, sought a better way to teach these students how to do research. Together with cartoonist Kevin Cannon, they created Information Now: A Graphic Guide to Student Research. It’s the first graphic novel to tackle information literacy and also the first graphic novel published by the University of Chicago Press.
The Danger in Drudgery
The most mind-numbing job I ever had was in an insurance company filing papers—carts full of policies to put in numerical order, hour after hour, 1064952, 2586027, 1943902, 1064951. The only thing that kept me awake was the occasional paper cut. I’m sure they’re still looking for some of the policies I misfiled in my stupor.
Every writer or editor is faced with a mindless task now and then: alphabetizing, renumbering, abbreviating . . .
Sections 6.124–26 in the Spotlight
Many writers to The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A ask how to format lists, and two questions are especially popular:
