Q. I’m editing company profiles for a business directory and often encounter statements like the following:
We were cited as Outstanding Exporter of the Year in 2008.
We are no. 6 in DQ’s “Best IT Employer Survey.”
Another editor placed quotation marks around “Outstanding Exporter of the Year.” How would CMOS place quotation marks in the list above?
A. In Chicago style, the titles of studies and articles are typically quoted; names of awards are not. There are gray areas, however. For instance, in your first sentence, “cited as” is very close to “quoted as,” which could justify the quotation marks. In any case, in some documents it might be preferable to treat similar items the same rather than distract with fine distinctions that give the appearance of inconsistency. This is yet another instance that calls for editing judgment.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. It has baffled me for years why the name of The New Yorker is sometimes written the New Yorker, and today I learned it is because the Chicago Manual advises it. I’m not sure why. The title of the magazine, as William Shawn used to say, is The New Yorker. To present it otherwise is to make a factual error, as it would be to print the New York Times, or the first letters of someone’s name in lowercase.
A. The books published by the University of Chicago Press regularly contain thousands of source citations. Given the impracticality of tracking down the “official” title and casing for each one, writers and editors dodge the issue by following a house style guide. The goal is to treat all titles the same way. This tactic has been so universally accepted that by now readers tend to be more outraged when two sources are treated differently than when a casing diverges from what they know to be “correct.” When you think about it, there would be no need for style manuals to rule on this issue if writers had the time and means to research whether every obscure source includes The in its title or not. And besides, not every source is as consistent or well known as the New Yorker. It’s not always possible to track down a single correct answer. Publishers can be inconsistent: even their own documents, websites, letterhead, and logos sometimes fail to agree. Long before the days of internet fact-checking, Chicago settled on lowercasing and printing in roman type the in the name of a periodical. If this means our books are filled with factual errors, they are at least serenely consistent, and few readers know exactly where the errors are.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. If our publication follows your style of italicizing the titles of most works (e.g., books), what would you recommend we
do in cases when that title must appear in the headline of an article? Italicization is not possible in our headline fields,
and our style for quotation marks in headlines is single quotation marks. Single quotes would likely improve clarity in many
cases, but it may also be best to use quotation marks only when needed for clarity. I would appreciate some reinforcement
as we try to pin this down for good.
A. Since you are more or less limiting your choices for styling titles in headlines to (1) using single quotation marks, (2)
not using quotation marks, and (3) using them inconsistently, I vote for number 1.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am editing an article, and the terms “Cause of Death,” “Manner
of Death,” “Natural,” “Accident,”
“Suicide,” “Homicide,” and “Undetermined”
are all capitalized. If the term is reused later in the article, e.g., “This is a Natural death”
and “There has been no finding as to the Manner and possible Cause of death,”
should I capitalize “Natural,” “Manner,”
and “Cause” in this latter usage?
A. This type of capping is antiquated and unfortunate. As common nouns and adjectives, the terms should be lowercased. They
may be italicized on first mention, but afterward they should appear as regular words—no italics or
quotation marks or caps.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. According to CMOS, the names of major sporting events are capitalized. But none of the examples provided include major sporting events made up of multiple games. For the World Series, for example, would it be Game Four of the 1948 World Series, or game four of the 1948 World Series?
A. Either way is fine, but Chicago style prefers to lowercase when there’s a choice, and we also like to use numerals for enumerations, so we would probably refer to game 4 of the World Series, in the way that we refer to chapter 1 of a book.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. A manuscript I’m working on right now features a quote in running text which refers to the twentieth
century. Since the quote is from the New York Times, it says “20th century”—which does not match the number
style for the rest of our book. Is spelling out the number a permissible change to the quote?
A. No, this is not the sort of thing you should change in a quotation. But don’t worry about appearing
inconsistent; readers won’t hold you responsible. They understand that you weren’t
available to copyedit everything that was ever written.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Dear CMOS: In chapter 8, you indicate that I need to capitalize regions in the United States such as the Northwest, East Coast, etc. What do I do when attempting to indicate specific regions in a particular county of a state? Do I write the North Central region of Contra Costa County, or do I lowercase north central, etc.? I believe that it should be the latter form, but I am not sure. Can you shed some light on this problem? P.S. I think you are gods! (If that will help get a quick response!! Thanks for your help :-)
A. (Make that “goddesses” and it will definitely get you a quicker reply.) Yes, you are right. We would lowercase regions within counties.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Dear CMOS, As a religious writer I am struggling with a recent (apparent) change. With the advent of computer spell-checkers, the term
“biblical” when referring to the Holy Scriptures is no longer capitalized. Turabian
seems to indicate that proper adjectives should be capitalized, whereas even older editions of the Oxford American Unabridged
Dictionary (for instance) do not. It would seem to me, since the term “bible”
when not capitalized can refer to a number of authoritative books in various fields, that the reference to the Holy Bible
as a proper noun should be capitalized in its adjectival form. What say you? Thank you.
A. CMOS does not capitalize “biblical,” nor has it ever (see p. 12 of the first edition, published in 1906 and available here). (Turabian follows Chicago style for most matters, by the way, including this one.) If you must capitalize “biblical,” however, you have our blessing (as long as you do so in a consistent and logical manner).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. My organization holds a lot of events, and we refer to them often on our website and in our member newsletter. Some are large programs (Last Remaining Seats film series); others are one-time events (Haunted Scavenger Hunt). In trying to determine how to format event titles, the closest comparison I found in CMOS was titles of exhibitions, which should be italicized (our events are more like museum exhibitions than world’s fairs). Would you agree that we should italicize all events, regardless of their size or duration?
A. Exhibitions are a special exception in CMOS because often they include a published catalog of the same title, and the confusion seemed to cause endless difficulty for writers. Your events are perhaps more akin to sporting events (CMOS 8.78), courses of study (8.86), or even holidays (8.89), so style them as you did in your query, with headline caps. If some events are lectures (8.87), you can put quotation marks around their titles.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Can you please confirm the correct spelling of “TIME magazine”? CMOS 8.171 has Time magazine. However, TIME customer service tells me that TIME Magazine is correct. I think “magazine” should be lowercased, since it does not appear anywhere on the cover, and I do not think it is part of the official name of the magazine, even though they capitalize it on their website. What do you think?
A. We’re sticking with Time magazine. One of the best things about having a style guide is not having to phone every organization in a document and talk to customer service; instead, we use the style manual to present titles consistently. Even if you were to check the periodical itself, you might find that the magazine cover has one spelling (TIME) but the copyright information has another (Time) and yet another is used in running text (Time). And you know for sure that if you phoned again, a different rep would give you a different answer.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]