1015. A rare chance to hear directly from the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style! The CMOS (pronounced "sea moss") is updated every seven years, and this year's update is a big one! I talked with two of the editors about the major changes, how the decisions get made, and the history of the CMOS.
1015. The Chicago Manual of Style is updated every seven years, and this year's update is a big one! I talked with two of the editors — Russell Harper and Mary Laur — about the major changes, how the decisions get made, and the history of the CMOS (pronounced "sea moss").
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Russell Harper and Mary Laur from the Chicago Manual of Style. They were editors for the new update that just came out, the 18th edition of this massively important style book. And it only happens every seven years, I believe. So we are going to nerd out about the Chicago Manual of Style words and language today. Russell and Mary, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
RUSSELL: Thank you.
MIGNON: So did I get that right? Is it every seven years that there's an update?
MARY: Yeah, that's pretty much the schedule we’re working on.
MIGNON: Yeah.
RUSSELL: Yeah, it's been seven years, the last few editions, right, Mary? I mean, it's been as long as 20 years, I think, from the 11th edition to the 12th, 1949 to 1969, And in the early years, there was an edition every other year, practically. So it's varied, but recently about seven.
MIGNON: So with such a long update schedule, before we get into the nitty gritty, can you give me a big picture of how that goes? I mean, are you already starting on the next edition, or do you have a couple of years off before you have to think about it again? How does it all work?
MARY: Well, I'm the editor at the press who oversees the whole process. So I can tell you that we do start working on the new edition even before the old one is out. So it's not really a surprise. Russell and I already have a CMOS 19 folder started. So we're constantly collecting suggestions from users via the Q&A. And that's one of the things that Russell does in his role. So he's seeing constantly what people are asking about and what they're interested in seeing more of. But we also get suggestions from authors, and colleagues, and peers and our own observations as we're using it and see, this needs updating, there's something missing here, whatever it is, we can jot it down and come back to it later when it's time for the revision. So the actual official revision process takes about three and a half years. Our kickoff meeting for CMOS 18 was on February 1st, 2021. So at that point we had a pretty good idea of the major areas of revision that we wanted to focus on.
So the very first thing we did was assemble our external advisory board. And that includes many people with lots of general expertise in editing and publishing but also a few people with special expertise on topics that we wanted to focus on. So, for example, Karen Yin from the Conscious Style Guide about inclusive language, and Jane Friedman, who's an expert on self-publishing.
MIGNON: That's fabulous. Yeah, Karen was a guest a few months ago, and Jane is wonderful. That's wonderful.
Yeah, so you mentioned the Q&A. So that's really interesting. So if people submit questions to you for the Q&A, that may get flagged for an area to update, is that right?
RUSSELL: Absolutely. I mean, every question that comes in the Q&A doesn't necessarily get a direct answer. And only about seven of them per month usually go, you know, get published. But every single word that comes to us we review. And as soon as I see them, I make quick notes on, you know, “Where is this going to go? Is this priority? Is this pointing out a clarification, possibly a correction, something for the next edition?”
So all of that, it’s been an incredibly useful and rich source of information too, as that goes into each new edition. So, yeah,
MIGNON: How many questions do you get every month?
RUSSELL: It's a good question. I think it must be, let's see, I don't know, a few hundred,
MIGNON: Yeah, I was going to say, I can imagine
RUSSELL: … several hundred.
MIGNON: … might be a lot!
RUSSELL: Yes, it may be more than that.
Just as they come in, I mean, that's the first thing I do every day is review those and sometimes send them on to others, including Mary, if they rise to the level of, “We really need to take another look at this,” and all that kind of stuff.
MIGNON: And so you're also listening to your authors and things like that. Do you ever look at social media and take suggestions from there?
RUSSELL: Well, I don't know about Mary, but when I'm doing part of the revision, Mary was mentioning how we convened and then convened people. I mean, it's this gathering together of opinions and everything else. But meanwhile, you know, I and others are pretty much always looking at social media to see what the chatter is, including what the chatter relative to Grammar Girl articles and podcasts might be and, you know, not that we are sponges who can absorb everything out there, but that's another. It's been an increasing source of information and opinions.
MIGNON: Yeah. And when you say "your authors," you know, I was thinking, you know, I tell people who uses the Chicago Manual of Style, but I would love to hear your perspective on who are your authors? Who are the primary people that you believe are your constituents that are using the book?
MARY: Well, the interesting thing about the Chicago Manual is that it really has the widest range of users of any style manual. At least, certainly, that's how we see it. Although there's certain disciplines like history and religious studies that use Chicago style in their books, and it's not limited to a single discipline in the way that say MLA is primarily used in literary studies or APA in social sciences. And it's also not limited to a single profession like AP for journalism or AMA for medicine. It is the primary style guide used by trade book publishers. So that's why there's a very wide range of editors, proofreaders, designers, et cetera: all the people we always mentioned who have to learn this style.
And often the authors who are publishing don't know it in advance, but they discover it when their books are edited in Chicago style. But it's also probably the most likely style guide that just a general member of the general public might encounter or consult if they have a question, you know, about a wedding invitation, or business communications, or anything like that.
So when we're making decisions about how to answer what kind of rulings to make on certain style points, we really do have to kind of consider the fact that we've got this wide range of users and contexts. So, that factors into our thinking.
MIGNON: Yeah. And it sounds like self-publishing was one of your …
MARY: Yes.
MIGNON: …new focuses because of your book publishing sort of expertise. Can you talk about that and what were some of the other big focuses for the changes in the new edition?
MARY: Well, the main ones that we had at the beginning were, of course, the whole range of issues related to inclusive language. And we did want to focus on both literary publishing and self-publishing. The Manual of Style grew out of, obviously, an academic nonfiction tradition. But we realized a long time ago that, as I said, it was sort of the Bible of trade book publishing and a very large percentage of that is actually fiction.
So we wanted to make sure that we were accounting for the things that fiction editors and writers might encounter that weren't otherwise covered and similarly, self-publishing. I don't know that the rules or the questions are quite so different, but particularly in the chapters that are about process, about editing and how editing works, and what are the parts of a book and everything, we wanted to make sure that self-publishing authors could see themselves, and that we mentioned them and described what was necessary for them at each relevant point in the manual.
RUSSELL: Yeah, and sometimes that was just a reminder that self-published authors would want to do this too, because in a way, both literary publishing and self-publishing were already in there in the sense that Chicago Manual of Style itself is a long and complex book with examples of all kinds of paragraphs, and examples, and special characters, and parts, and chapters, and the things that go into a book, and pretty much any work of fiction or any self-published book could find itself in there as a less complex, almost always less complex version of a book like the Chicago Manual of Style.
So we've been working on making sure that anytime … like we mentioned a copyright page. What about self-publishers? That kind of consideration is reminders. Some people might not need that, but we think it helps make the book more generally applicable for people, for a very broad audience.
MIGNON: Yeah. And thinking about fiction, I noticed that there's a section, I think it's new, on how to handle emoji at the end of sentences relative to punctuation. And, was that for fiction?
RUSSELL: Not necessarily. And in the middle of sentences. I remember I first floated the idea of adding something about emojis, which we now say "emojis," even though "emoji" is the technical plural Japanese. But “emojis” has overtaken "emoji" — is more popular. But that wasn't about fiction. When I first floated the suggestion for the 16th edition, I got a bunch of, well, I got a lot of silence and then, a couple of, “Uh, no,” like that's not, it's the manual is too serious for that, but what we wanted to do is recognize, that in yes, other fiction and other types of creative writing and even social media, just to acknowledge at the very least that an emoji works sort of like a word.
And so here are some general spacing and punctuation observations, but also, here's a reminder these are actually Unicode characters with a hexadecimal code point established by the Unicode Consortium and, you know, just so that people go into it knowing that, for example, if they're a copy editor, and they see an emoji in the fiction that they're editing, we'll make sure that it's a Unicode character. And if not, figure out what to do about it. We even added the consideration that, you know, how an emoji looks on one device in the year 2024 may not represent what it will look like on that same device or a different device five years from now. So, if it's important for historical reasons to represent an exact image, you have to take that into account.
So we just wanted to make sure that we address them because they are an increasing part of the writing and publishing landscape.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's an excellent point about them looking different on different platforms, and how they change over time. Going back to the inclusive language update, I know a lot of people have noticed the new singular "they" entry. Can you talk about the changes to that entry for the new edition?
MARY: Sure. Well, this was the single most requested and anticipated change in the book. Honestly, I thought when we put out the 17th edition in 2017, that we had given users permission to use the generic singular "they" in formal writing; that is using "they" instead of "he" or "she" or "she/he." And we had definitely given approval for the use of the referential singular "they," which is the case where individuals who don't identify with either "he" or "she" prefer to use "they."
But I think CMOS 17 just kind of came out at an awkward time. And this is where our seven-year revision cycle kind of bit us a little bit because I think it was really very soon after that came out that the weight of usage shifted so definitively toward, “Of course, this is okay.” But it's our policy not to change the rules in between editions because we want users to know whatever we say is going to be there for seven years. You don't have to constantly be looking things up and seeing if it's changed in the last week or whatever. So when we did start the revision, pretty much everybody who we got feedback on said, “You need to not only include this but use the word 'endorse' not just sort of say it's kind of okay in some cases, but endorse.”
And of course, at that point, basically there was really no opposition within the revision team, we all agreed that that was reasonable. In the 18th edition, paragraph 5.51 now actually uses the word "endorse" as in "Chicago now endorses it." So hopefully that's eliminated any ambiguity. And of course our goal is always to encourage clarity and concision in writing.
So, there's still a paragraph in there with other options, because sometimes that isn't the best option, and some people still aren't comfortable with it, but for anyone who is comfortable with it, we don't want to push people to do silly, elaborate workarounds when you have a nice, simple option.
RUSSELL: And we also wanted to suggest what are the appropriate uses for it. And one classic one is that it matches with indefinite pronouns. Like “everyone needs to bring their lunch.” Fifty, 60 years ago, grammarians would have held their noses at that and said you need a singular antecedent for "everyone" because it's “everyone is” not “everyone are,” but that's a classic one.
And I would like to make a little historical note here if I can, which is from a footnote on pages 76 and 77 of the 14th edition of the manual, which was published in 1993, it's a footnote to a sentence in the chapter about chapter two, telling, you know, just giving some guidance for what copy editors should look for.
And one of the things they should look for is gender bias. And the footnote says, well, it basically says the University of Chicago Press recommends the quote — and it used quote marks — "revival," end quote, of the singular use of "they" and “their” citing, among others, Jane Austen and Shakespeare. So that was 31 years ago.
And that same footnote also cited Dennis Barron, who, I think, recently published “What’s Your Pronoun,” and he's been studying grammar and gender for decades now. So his name is actually in the 14th edition also. So this is kind of a change that editors have been looking for, and for years, and it's not that it comes into every sentence, but it is, I think a sigh of relief has been, you know, editors are breathing the sigh of relief that they don't have to always avoid it. There are times when it becomes a very nice tool to have, rather than writing around it. So, yeah.
MIGNON: Wow. And going back to '93; that's a surprise actually. That's great. Wild. I want to move on to some of the more, the smaller rule changes, the nitpicky little things. We're going to really nerd out here now. A change that I really liked is that the place of publication is no longer needed.
So when you're doing a citation, you don't have to say University of Chicago Press. Chicago. Can you talk about the thinking behind that and why finally, finally you were able to do that?
RUSSELL: Well, I have to say in this case, one of the reasons we did it is because other style guides had done it. The example you point to is great because technically it would have been Chicago, colon, University of Chicago Press, comma, and then the date. And so obviously that one reads as redundant.
And in many other cases, it'll be like New York, Simon and Schuster, New York, just on and on. And there can be some significance to the cities. If you have a long list of citations, you can get an idea of what parts of the world the scholarship's coming from. But the idea was, well, “What's it cost us?”
It costs us time. Editors have to check the city of publication, and there isn't always a great way to check it these days. Although you can go to WorldCat, and it's usually recorded there. And if you don't have access to the title page, which is becoming harder and harder for books, it's often blocked on Google Books, for example, the preview, everything but the title page and other other important pieces, copyright page might be there. So to make a long story short, there seemed to be no resistance to dropping it. When there was resistance, you just have the reminder. I give the reminder that, if the city is truly relevant, by all means, include it, or mention it in the text, because if it's relevant to the scholarship then you can do that.
And, for example, if you want to cite the nearly simultaneous, I think it may have been a few months apart, publication of Melville's "Moby Dick" in New York City and London in 1851, the rule in Chicago and MLA, by the way, for books published before 1900, is to include the city and the year, not the publication, because the publisher is often just a person who is facilitating the publication.
So those would be New York, comma, 1851, and London, comma, 1851. So there it's relevant because you want to know which. There's significant differences between the two editions. And there are differences. So as a scholar, you would need to record which one you were looking at.
And if you're talking about something after 1900, it becomes much more important that it was Simon and Schuster or some publisher anywhere in the world. But if it's like Gallimard or something, that's a French publisher. It's not Paris Gallimard. Okay. Well, you don't have to say Paris anymore. You should know what it is. And so in other words, it was one thing that became a burden to copy editors, didn't seem to benefit readers, and it was time to go. So we agreed with everyone else. And if we held on longer than most of the others, it's partly because of our, I would say, longer relationship to book publishing.
So the whole idea of faithfulness to the title page and documenting that was more important to us. And it was harder for us to let go, but we did.
MIGNON: Yeah. Well, yeah. And here's another change that it's a big change really for people. So when capitalizing titles, you now capitalize longer prepositions. And you know, it makes me think about one question I heard on social media is, “Why do they make these changes? We learned these rules, and now they're making us learn new rules.”
And what's the purpose of making a change like that means, you know, everyone has to learn something new now.
RUSSELL: Well, that change in particular, that ties in a little bit to what I would say is a kind of theme, or something that informed the revisions for the 18th edition, which is getting closer to real world practice. It's kind of an adjustment where we felt that Chicago had the gap between what Chicago recommends and what actually happens out there in the world started to get too wide.
So, a sticking point at the Press for the last 30 years, or it's been 50 years since it was published almost, is Norman McLean's book of stories. The title story is called "A River Runs Through It." And we've been arguing for 30 years at the press whether to capitalize “through,” a river runs through it.
Okay. "Through" is a preposition, the only preposition in that title, but also the longest word in the title and a pretty important word. So, I think for one edition, it may have been the 15th, we capitalized it and then put a little apology within the manual that we did that. I'm not sure I should have looked that up, but I know that in the 17th edition, there's one example of a citation that has “a river runs through it,” “through” is lowercase.
We also had "The Gospel according to Matthew," which is an example that was introduced in 1969 for the 12th edition, which is also the edition that specified for the 1st time ... we'd always said since the very 1st edition to lowercase unimportant words and the examples that supported that would have words like “of,” so lowercase prepositions.
So the 12th edition said lowercase prepositions in titles of works, regardless of length. So that was like, okay, regardless of length. And then, “according to” you could argue that “according” should always be uppercase, but the editors then said, no, “according to” is a phrasal preposition. So it gets all lowercase.
So "The World according to Garp," lowercase "according to" that seemed to be out of step with what everyone else was doing and "Much Ado about Nothing," Shakespeare's famous play, “about” as a preposition, but you'll see it uppercase by almost everyone. Why? Because AP style is to uppercase it. And by extension, most of what people will see online when they look these titles up, the average preposition of greater than four words is going to be capitalized.
So we thought, “Well, what about four words?” AP would capitalize the word “with” in the middle of a title. Okay. Are we going to go that far? And we thought not quite because the tradition of lowercasing prepositions had been going on for so long that we only felt comfortable going down to “four words” or “four letters or fewer” in the title word, or as a few editors would say "four letters or less," just because the “or less” makes it more mathematical and then “fewer” becomes too fussy.
So, you know, 10 items …
MIGNON: Maybe it’s easier to say five or more.
RUSSELL: Five or more. Yes. Which is what I think we ended up doing in the manual. That's a good point because then there's no "lesser," "fewer" …
MIGNON: The new rule is to capitalize prepositions of five or more letters.
RUSSELL: Yes, yes. Which is what I think the Blue Book, the legal Blue Book does. And it's also what you'll find, believe it or not on Wikipedia. So, which is one of the first places all of us go to find out a little bit more about something that we know nothing about. So you look up the title of a movie, or book, or play, or whatever, or a song, and then you'll see that.
And it's fine to have a principle if the principle has something to it. But if you, you know, back to "A River Runs Through It" or "Much Ado About Nothing," the significance of lowercasing a preposition, the idea is supposed to be that it's not an important word. Okay. But once it becomes a big word, it's just arbitrary, and I don't think we've found any evidence among readers that would matter to them, lowercasing something simply because it's a preposition, and I like to use an example sometimes of the word “is,” a John Updike novel from the late '70s, "Rabbit," actually this one's from the late '80s, no, late '70s. "Rabbit Is Rich," um, the word “is,” it's just a little linking word.
So “rabbit” and “rich” are the two things. "Rabbit Is Rich." You capitalize the I in “is” because it's a verb, and all verbs are important. So again, it's a little arbitrary. We didn't want to go too, too far against. We didn't want to continue to swim against the tide for that one, which is…
MIGNON: Yeah. No, it's great to hear the rationale. Another change is about proper nouns and french fries. I swear, every time I write it, I have to look it up because it's changed in multiple style guides and dictionaries over the years. So now, are we capitalizing "french fries" or not in the 18th edition?
I still can't remember.
RUSSELL: No, we're not. And the reason is, it has to do with, well, this started with the very first thing I noticed when I got all the files for the 17th edition and began to incorporate suggestions and things from our proposal, which had been vetted by all the reviewers inside and outside the press was that we were lowercasing "Roman" and "Arabic" in the context of roman and arabic numerals.
And I put this into the preface just because it was a sign. Well, okay, why were we doing that? Well, we were literally following our own rule. Which is, if the use is non-literal— you're not referring to numbers that are specifically Roman or specifically Arabic — they're a style of numbers that, yes, they derive from practices that could have, would have been called Roman or Arabic at one time. And the idea was that that was the logic, but I looked at it and everywhere they were, they were uppercase by almost everyone, dictionaries, every source. So I'm like, “Okay, what happened? What happened here?” And I looked at it, and it went back to the 12th edition.
We'd always … the manual from 1906 to 1949 or 1969, when the 12th was published, use capital R and capital A for "Roman" and "Arabic." "Roman type" and it’s like, "italic type," was always lowercase because those uses were considered non-literal or generic. "Italic type" doesn't mean that it's Italian or Italian in style yet.
Well, yes, it does historically, but it loses that meaning. And it's kind of like diesel engine, diesel fuel. Why isn't the D capitalized? Rudolph Diesel is it's named for that, and you have on the other hand, a Bunsen burner, and that is capitalized, capital B. Well, how do we know this? Because the dictionary records common usage.
The dictionary, Merriam-Webster is one that's very good at keeping up continually with their updates and looking at usage to do these things; so, it started to become a matter of, well, if you're lowercasing "bunsen burner" because you're just saying this is a device in my high school laboratory class, you know. I don't know if people use bunsen burners anymore. Why is it capitalized in the dictionary and can’t, we didn’t want to get into all of that. So we kept the logic, and we then said, if in doubt, go with the dictionary because "French windows," "French dressing" are capitalized in Merriam-Webster. No option for lowercase. Whereas "french fry" is either entered as lowercase and has an equal variant capitalized. And if you want to think about this, the reason could be that a French person is literally French, that’s capital F. A French window is, or French dressing, they’re in the style, a style that would still be characterized as French, so that’s still capitalized.
French fries, on the other hand, are potatoes that have been cut in the French style, but they've been frenched, lowercase "f," into strips, and then prepared. They're not French in any, French, you could have, somebody making fries of some kind in France and say, “Well, these are French fries," but usually it's just "french fry.”
It's a style. They're not literally French and somehow common usage … people have sort of realized that. Whereas with like French dressing, Russian dressing, Italian dressing, no, it hasn't lost its proper meaning. So we decided we were wrong about "French windows" and "French dressing."
Those should be capitalized. And we would have decided that about "french fries" reluctantly, maybe, even though they're not really French. But the dictionary entry in Merriam-Webster, first one is lowercase "f," but a lot of the principles still apply. And if in doubt, go to the dictionary. Go to other sources.
See how it's used. We don't want to stick to our literal versus non-literal usage because there are too many gray areas. So we defer to Merriam-Webster, which we're very happy to have as a sort of, you know, that's our primary guide. You know, the OED is also an incredible resource, but for people working with North American spelling traditions, then Merriam-Webster is what we advise.
And so it's a long explanation, but it's a difficult subject. You know, those terms.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's really interesting. So there were some changes to, there were, I'm not sure if there were changes or new words, but in the sort of “E” words, "E-book," "E-sports," there were some changes to hyphenation there that I think might be interesting.
RUSSELL: Yeah, well, that one, that's just something we keep looking at. And, you know, some people remember that for the 17th edition, we jumped ahead of Merriam-Webster and said, no hyphen in "email." We were reading the tea leaves. We just basically … usage seemed to be going so quickly in that direction that we had no trouble dropping the hyphen and saying, “Well, this is an exception. Other e-terms retain the hyphen, "e-commerce," words like that, but we did, we've reanalyzed it for this new edition.
And if you look at like a Google Ngram of its huge sampling of works published in English since 1800, of course, when entering since, you know, very recently, "ebook" for example, it's absolutely taken off with no hyphen, that the hyphenated version has been left in the dust by like a factor of five. Dictionaries haven't caught up, but that could be partly because what they're scanning includes, and this is a very recent change, last five years kind of thing, but what they're scanning would include copyright pages of books, and often the copyright pages of books will give ISBN numbers, and then which format. This is hardcover, paperback, ebook, and "ebook," often won't have a hyphen in that context.
So, for whatever reason, we decided as people who serve the book, book publishing community to jump ahead and have "ebook" as one word. We looked at "esports" because we’d gotten, you talked about social media earlier. A few years ago, someone pretty influential in the gaming community, I think, did a kind of quote tweet of some hyphenated esports and said, like, “Go , go with it.”
Maybe this is the kind of thing I should look up before these interviews, but the bottom line is the gaming community doesn't put a hyphen in "esport" or "esports." And that's another one. If you look Ngrams, Google Ngram, it's huge. Like "esports" without the hyphen has just absolutely eclipsed the hyphenated version.
So we're thinking, “Well, if the gaming community wants it, it's their word. We want to reflect how it's used. We'll go ahead of the dictionary on that one too.” But if you look up other terms like "e-bike," "e-commerce," those retain the hyphen and maybe always will, it's hard to say. And just to wrap up on that, part of this theme of trying to find out how others are doing it, and that's not always the determination, but it will be the determination if we think of the fact that writers want to, we want to encourage writing that is as clear as possible, and you know, it's the writer's intent. Like, what does the writer mean here?
And anytime you stray from common usage, there has to be, I think, a good reason for that. Because, if you write "e-mail" with a hyphen, I don't know, among copy editors, the reaction would be, “Did the New Yorker add the hyphen for you?” You know, because the New Yorker is one publication and their style is still "e-mail" with a hyphen.
Okay, but the Chicago Manual of Style serves a much broader, you know, it's not one publication. It's many publications — 50+ University of Chicago Press journals, 200+ books that we acquire. But then the whole world of business writers and everybody else. So being up to date on things like that, that's important for us.
So we look at these terms, and any rule that we list for hyphenating something or capitalizing something we assess and reassess every time to see if there's been any change.
MIGNON: Yeah. You've brought up different style guides a number of times. And it reminds me of that "Onion" article that talked about, something like gang violence or a rumble between the AP Stylebook and the Chicago Manual Style editors. And I know people have asked me if you feel a rivalry between the different style books.
I find myself wondering more if you have tea parties together and you know, what is your relationship with, professionally, as a style manual, sort of your perspective toward other style books and the changes they make or the role they have in how they influence your decisions?
RUSSELL: Well, yes very much. And one of the first jobs, you know, kind of tasks I was given in, let’s say early 2008, was to do an analysis of other style guides relative to Chicago and then, and then put it into a spreadsheet and line that up. And I've been doing that ever since.
And it's just. I think it's important because different style guides serve different groups. So when there is a difference we try to figure out why some of them are obvious, the whole, Oxford comma versus no Oxford comma. Pretty sure that comes out of a tradition of concision in newspaper writing.
Every single character counts when it's in print and in narrow columns and there's a deadline. So, removing the extra comma maybe in 20 places in a single longer article would be a good idea. And that whole thing that's come up again because of the Harris and Walz ticket. Which is Harris? Is it "Harris's" or "Harris" apostrophe S for the possessive or just Harris apostrophe and AP style guide is sort of a holdout there. You might think because it's just Harris apostrophe. But again, that's for editorial concision. It's a different approach to this, the same problem. And being aware of those differences is helpful in figuring out, well, why does this, why do we have this rule in the first place and what is it trying to accomplish and do we need to reassess it for any reason?
So, yeah, that's always part of the process.
MARY: There was also, I was recently at a conference where there were representatives from a range of different style manuals. So Council of Science Editors, CSE, the AMA, APA, and ACS, American Chemical Society, and the editors from those publications were doing a presentation about how they’re dealing with updating their guidelines on inclusive language. And that was a case that sort of showed how we're all sort of dealing with the same issues. So we really have more in common than we are rivals per se. And, you know, we're each dealing with similar issues for our specific constituencies, and CMOS overlaps with several of those as I mentioned earlier, but ultimately we're all sort of trying to make the best decisions for our audiences. And I think we all have, as I said, more in common than we do not, so.
MIGNON: Yeah. And I think the Oxford comma is a great example because it's about serving your particular market or your particular users. And when column inches in print puts a restriction on how many characters you have, then that guides a different choice than when you're writing a book that has a lot more space to breathe. It's a great example of that. Going back a minute to hyphens, I did get a lot of questions about hyphens. One was everyone seems to drop those in compound adjectives now, like “state-of-the art” and things like that. Like, how do you decide? And I know there've been updates to the hyphenation table, the beloved Chicago Manual of Style hyphenation table that I know editors reference a lot.
So how did you decide some of the different changes there?
RUSSELL: Well, there haven't been very many changes to that. It's mostly the rules have stayed mostly the same. But we did push it a little further because we get a lot of questions, at least I've seen many in the Q&A about hyphenation, they continue to come in. And I think sometimes you see a mix of people who want, there's some people who want to always hyphenate everything before when it's an open compound that gets drawn into service as a modifier before a noun.
Always want to hyphenate it. And we still have, I think the language, we've kept it in there. It's well, it's never wrong to hyphenate and you know, a compound adjective before a noun, it's not always necessary. And in some cases it's, I guess it could be considered wrong. You wouldn't hyphenate “United States” in “United States Government” because it's a proper noun.
And proper nouns tend to not … you can't put anything in the middle of a proper noun because then it changes that noun. But we looked at other things and decided, “Well, spare hyphenation has always been a goal in the manual, a stated goal, which means, use hyphens judiciously and only when necessary.”
So, I guess a good example would be, which we've had before, “graduate student housing.” We've said, for example, “graduate student housing” is clear without any hyphens, even though you could say “graduate-student housing.” For this edition, we tried to just be a little bit more, “Well, what do we mean? Why would that be clear?”
Whereas something else isn't, because I think that's still unknown. And the answer to that is, is sort of, well, again, a little bit more attention to the dictionary. I personally thought that “high school student” doesn't need a hyphen. And I used these examples at ACES, I think in April, “guest room access,” “high school student.” ‘Guest room” you'll find it's an established open compound. "High school" is an established open compound.
So adding a hyphen just sometimes to those terms and not others, does that help readers in any way? And, arguably no. Although it wouldn't be wrong to hyphenate, wanted to give just another tool to editors, you know, something to consider, not really a tool, but something to consider, which is that you're adding the hyphens for clarity.
So you can back off a little, if they're not needed. On the other hand, if you say that a plan is first rate, you go to a dictionary and you find that “first-rate” is hyphenated, and there could be a momentary misreading in that plan is “first-rate.” Well, “first-rate,” the reader, it helps the reader to see “first-rate” as the modifier there, even though it's after the noun.
So, following the lead of Bryan Garner, actually, who's had a small list of these words in his, you know, now it's Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th edition 2019, I believe. No 2022. Sorry. That we decided that “first-rate” and a few others “old-fashioned,” “ill-advised,” some set hyphenated adjectives can remain hyphenated after the noun. And that then becomes something where it can take the burden off the editor. Just say, well, check the dictionary. If you think that hyphen might be needed afterwards, check the dictionary. And if it's hyphenated there, do it. That would extend to something like “well-read,” which is also in Merriam-Webster with a hyphen.
But when used postpositively or after the noun, we still say that you don't need the hyphen with “well read.” A well-read student (hyphen) is well read (no hyphen). So it's just an incremental change and a clarification. I know some people don't like when a rule isn't like, “Always do this. Always” because then that would be every compound, every two or more word compound in front of a noun, we get hyphens.
That's it. We're done. But it doesn't quite, and none after, it doesn't quite work that way. And we just want to make sure that people know that it's not wrong to have a few exceptions in there. And we name , and then we defer to the dictionary for any case of doubt. But with the idea that, hyphen before noun adds clarity and that general principle can come into play most of the time.
MIGNON: The conversation reminds me, I heard a rumor that Chicago was thinking about dropping the en dash, but it didn't happen. But like, was there discussion about just not using the en dash anymore?
RUSSELL: I think I can see Mary rolling her eyes a bit on that one. She's a fan of the en dash, right, Mary? I am too. So you're talking to …
MARY: Well, I think that rumor got … Yeah, that rumor got started because back when we published the 15th edition, our managing editor at the time did an interview with the New York Times about the new edition and happened to mention that she was not a fan of the en dash and thought maybe we should drop it.
And that was the thing that they decided to build the story around and that was pretty much her opinion and not the team. So that's why that keeps coming up. But I guess I can say pretty definitively that nobody on the team is looking to quash the en dash. So, we did make some refinements to it this time, which, you know, Russell can address if that's …
RUSSELL: Yeah, and this ties into that discussion of the style books, because, of course, AP Stylebook, no en dashes, partly for historical reasons that characters that could go over wireless transmission and, you know, however, articles are transmitted until very recently, I understand, but now in the era of Unicode, there isn't really much of a reason not to use en dashes, but there's also not much of a reason to use them when you think about it, because if you have an entire tradition of journalism that never uses en dashes, including in sports scores, like, 31–3, and that's fine.
Readers get by with that just fine. And they never seem to have a problem. For Chicago then, which serves a different goal, which you could say, includes book publishers who want to publish the most beautiful and typographically elegant and great books that they can, well, an en dash between numbers and ranges, like pages 3–7, it adds a little bit more space between the two digits and arguably makes them easier to read.
It's a typographical nicety that has been used since the beginning of the manual and before. So since before the last century. And, you know, the very original rationale for them in 1906 was between, all, in hyphenated, all capital titles, I think use en dashes because between the big letters, the little hyphen gets lost.
They didn't quite put it that way, but the idea is that it provides a little bit more spacing and can be helpful also when connecting a two-word compound to another word or compound and a number ranges. So now …
MIGNON: That I …
RUSSELL: Go ahead.
MIGNON: I've heard it said that an en dash is a sure sign that something has been professionally edited.
RUSSELL: Yes, that's …
MARY: That is a little bit of an insider.
Yeah. It's an insider thing that probably some people who are listening to this or watching it might not even know what we're talking about, but it's the longer dash that it goes into sports scores and other things that mean from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. It's a typographical nicety.
Yes.
MIGNON: Longer than a hyphen, shorter than what you'd think of as a regular dash.
RUSSELL: Yes. And if you see it in something like “pre–Civil–War,” which lowercase "pre," hyphen, capital C, "civil," and then space, "war." The idea with that en dash is that it connects "pre" to the entire compound "Civil War." Now I would be willing to bet that most readers don't see it that way. If they do, it's one of those almost, it's a subliminal thing, and it's again, like you've said, and Mary said, it's a sign that it's been edited, and it's very pleasing to editors to see that and may not make any difference for readers.
But no, we're not dropping the en dash. That additional usage is just to say that in, well, Epstein–Barr virus, that's one of the examples in the new edition. The en dash in Epstein–Barr virus or in something like Mason–Dixon line or in Ali–Frazier fight, um, it's between two people, whereas, the example also in the manual of the Albers–Schonberg disease.
Albers–Schonberg, hyphenated German name — it's German, I think — who described a bone density problem that's opposite of osteoporosis, I think. It's a hyphenated name. So you have a hyphenated name versus two names. And again the en dash, readers may not notice that, but it's a sign of editorial care.
The editors have to look up those names anyway. I don't care, you know, sure, maybe there are certain names that you know so well that you're not going to look up. Maybe you’re a science editor, exactly what Epstein–Barr, Epstein–Barr virus means. And you're not going to look up the two R's in “Barr” or whatever, but, it means that editors have to look up everything and attend to everything.
So if you also see the en dash is properly applied Hawley–Smoot tariff also, that's two different names. So that would be en dash. And if you're a copy editor who says, “No, I will not, I will not add those en dashes. That's too much.” You have the authority to not do them. It probably won't matter, but we like en dashes.
MIGNON: So at least as far as Chicago Manual Style, the en dash is safe for at least seven years, probably longer.
RUSSELL: Probably longer. And maybe …
MIGNON: So I want to wrap up the main section.
RUSSELL: I was going to say maybe AI will eventually take care of it for us.
MIGNON: That’s where I was going actually. I wanted to wrap up the main section with there's new information about citing AI in the style book. And, you know, I would just love to hear about that. I know some people are like, why are people even citing AI? So you can talk about how you think about that and how you decided how to put in these guidelines for citing AI.
MARY: Well, it was interesting that, you know, when we sent the manuscript to copy editing in April of 2023, so that's how long it took us to get from the launch date to the copy editing process. I don't think there was anything about AI in there, or if there was, it was very minimal. And that this was a case where again, we're sort of at an odd point in the evolution of this technology. So, we were able during review of copy editing and proof to sneak in a few things here and there as best we could. But there's so much that's uncertain about it now that, we're again, conscious of the seven-year cycle issue and only wanted to put in as much as we could sort of comfortably say at this point, which isn't a ton. A little bit in the chapter about legal issues because that obviously is a huge way in which this affects writers, editors, and publishers. But then, again, we did have the chance to include a little bit about citations. So Russell, you can take that part of the question.
RUSSELL: Yeah. Well, when we first, you know, we like MLA, APA, and others, started to put stuff up and the Q&A and shop talk about citing AI because people wanted to know. And when I first added something to the QA about citing images and citing, you know, chatbots, that was about March 2023.
And at that point, I think it was Google Bard, it's now Google Gemini, and ChatGPT didn't yet have native share buttons, but then they added those. So you can have a publicly shared link, which makes it more like citing a social media conversation.
So to us, the important part is well, to follow our principles of citation, which is that citation should show clearly what you cited, what it is, where it is, where somebody else can go to consult it. And I wrote also just, this is related only because it becomes related, an article in say, November of 2023 on testing ChatGPT and what was then Google Bard, to see how well it answered very specific questions about copyright status and then three questions that range from, you would have to have insider knowledge and do the research and access to sources up to a general write this in the style of whatever.
And of course, the chatbots did horribly on the specific questions and very much better on the more stylistic puzzles. And, Bard then became Gemini, and I went back to the post a while back and said, “Okay, so the links that I put in there to the public links to the Bard conversations are gone. So now I'm going to replace that with the public link to the screenshots that I kept at the time of the whole conversation.”
The point of this is that as far as we're concerned, citing something means I saw this, and this is the data that I'm relying on and you need to tell readers that so that they know where that information is coming from.
And so the most important part of the citation is that you keep it for your records or make it publicly available to somebody else. And another addition that's, I think, related to all of this for this edition (addition for this edition) of the manual was to add something about how to cite an archive.
Something that's been archived, like to the Wayback Machine. And that I think is going to become a bigger part of source citations as time goes on. But now we do show this is how to cite a source that's been archived. And I get to all of this because, in other words, we don't know what the standards are, legalities.
I mean, can you write a novel based on a series of prompts to ChatGPT? I don't know. There might be copyright issues there. You know, there are lawsuits going on. What is the text that you're putting into your novel? Where did that actually come from? Is it owned by Microsoft at that point, or is it, you know, they're all, we don't get into that, but we do, like Mary mentioned, we did add our copyright specialist, intellectual property attorney added some considerations about AI to the copyright chapter, chapter four, but the other stuff, it's more like our concern is how to cite the source concisely and in a way that makes sense for readers.
So, but we're not, I mean, these are early days, I think.
MIGNON: Yeah. It is a tough time for you to be writing about that but a very thoughtful approach. Thank you so much. This is the end of the main section for Russell Harper and Mary Laur from the Chicago Manual of Style. If you're a Grammarpaloozian, if you're a subscriber through Apple Podcasts or Subtext, we're going to continue the discussion in a bonus section. We're going to talk about the things they might've wanted to get in as changes that didn't make it. We're going to talk about the new color of the Chicago Manual of Style, the merch they have available, and Mary and Russell's book recommendations. But for the regular main listeners, this is the end of the show. Thank you Russell and Mary for being here today.
RUSSELL: Thank you, Mignon, very much.