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).
The convention of hyphenating a compound modifier before a noun but not after—as in a well-known author versus an author who is well known—has been Chicago style since the first edition (published in 1906).
Anyone who’s familiar with contemporary English-language novels would have little trouble reading a novel published in the 1700s in an original edition. By the middle of that century, conventions related to printed text and punctuation were starting to look almost modern.
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.
One of the main reasons to insert a hyphen between two words that aren’t normally hyphenated is to help readers sort out the text when those words are used as a compound modifier before a noun.
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.
From the blank page to the gaps between words, space is central to what writers and editors do every day. But just because space is empty doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.
Latin may be a dead language, but many of its words and phrases flourish in modern English. The most common Latin borrowing might be an abbreviation: the all-purpose etc., short for et cetera, “and others of the same kind.”
Coordinating conjunctions join pairs of words, phrases, or clauses, but when such a conjunction is interrupted by an intervening phrase or clause, it can be difficult to know where to put the commas. This is especially true when the conjunction joins the parts of a compound sentence.
If you’ve ever had to learn how to use commas with relative clauses—especially clauses introduced by which or that—you may have encountered the word restrictive and its opposite, nonrestrictive. What do those two words mean, and what do they have to do with commas?
