Q. I am ghostwriting a memoir for a client who once worked at a German motorcycle magazine known as mo, lowercase. I am struggling with capitalization rules for this in the English-language memoir I am writing. The client does
not want to write “mo magazine” each time it is referenced, and when written in lowercase, mo seems to get lost in each paragraph, even when italicized. What would CMOS recommend in a situation such as this?
A. We’re cool with italic lowercase mo. Readers are used to taking in small words. Clarify occasionally with “mo magazine” to aid readers in recognizing the little word whenever it appears.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Question: When the day of a month is spelled out, as in “the second of January,”
should it be capitalized, i.e., “the Second of January”?
Q. Which is correct: “on January second” or “on January Second”?
A. Okay, this is intriguing: these two questions arrived on the same day a few hours apart. Do we have dueling colleagues? Friends
who made a bet? Or maybe—tragically—soul mates who don’t
even know each other and never will? The answer is that Chicago style lowercases the number of the month unless it’s
a holiday like the Fourth of July. Will one of you write to explain this mystery when it’s posted? Let’s
hope for an update next month.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. A coworker with a PhD in English lit comments that your example of title casing “Four Theories concerning
the Gospel according to Matthew” isn't correct at all. “Concerning”
and “according” are participles, not prepositions (thus these are participial,
not prepositional, phrases). I've absolutely never seen “Gospel according to Anyone”—it's
always “According to.” Thoughts? I'm not just nitpicking; trying to get a group
of proofreaders and editors to pull together consistently on little stuff like this.
A. Gulp—a PhD in English lit? Well, here goes: Although “concerning”
and “according” are participles, that doesn't stop them from forming prepositions.
(You can confirm this in a dictionary.) In the title cited, “concerning” is a
preposition with the object “Gospel,” and “according to”
is a preposition with the object “Matthew,” so according to Chicago style they
are lowercased. Many publishers follow a different guideline for title casing, however, by which all words over a certain
length are uppercased, so it's not surprising if you see these prepositions uppercased in titles.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I work at an ad agency, and I’m the only writer/editor/proofreader on staff. A recent title bothered
our creative director because only one word in it was not capitalized (unbalanced from a design perspective, I guess): Why
Full-Service Advertising Is More Important than Ever. My question is, first of all, am I correct that the word “than”
should be lowercased in the above title? And second, what’s your opinion on making capitalization decisions
on ad copy based on how things look? I’m willing to fudge the rules a bit for great design, but I’m
not willing to throw the rules out the window altogether.
A. Advertising design, as opposed to, say, bibliography writing, is all about breaking the rules. But here, rules and advertising
are in harmony. Not only should “than” (a conjunction) be capitalized in a title,
but your creative director is right—it looks weird lowercased.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Quotation marks in titles and subheads seem inappropriate, except those required when referring to particular works. However,
I can find no reference to support my position in Chicago or elsewhere. I’m supposing that is because
scare quotes in heads are a rare occurrence.
A. Quotation marks in titles and subheads are required whenever something is quoted. Although Chicago discourages the impulsive
use of scare quotes, sometimes they are appropriate, even in titles, so you won’t find a rule against
them in CMOS.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am writing a novel. How do I write a title of a song in the body of the work (caps, bold, underline, italics, etc.)? Example: The Zombies’ “She’s Not There” looped in his head.
A. Noooo! Now that song is looping in my head (“but it’s too late to say you’re sorry . . .”). Use quotation marks. Thanks a lot.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. What is the proper way of capitalizing foreign titles appearing at the end of English titles and subtitles? For example,
hypothetically, should it be “Aeneas Traveling Noctis per umbram” or “Aeneas Traveling Noctis per Umbram”? Headline style seems to conflict with Chicago recommendations for foreign titles. There doesn’t
seem to be any advice for melding the two, as far as I can tell.
A. The sentence-cased Latin title fits Chicago style more neatly, but the headline caps aren’t wrong.
(When it’s difficult to find an answer to a question like this, you can be fairly confident that there
isn’t a single “proper” way to do it.)
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am writing a government report, and the first letters of words in the title are supposed to be capitalized. In such a case, should prepositions be capitalized? The government employee who edited my work said that along should be capitalized, but not of, and this doesn’t make any sense to me.
A. Although Chicago style lowercases prepositions (but see CMOS 8.159 for exceptions), some style guides uppercase them. Ask your editor for a style guide.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am quoting from a document that has a lot of words in all caps, for emphasis. In my report the quote appears as a block
quote, and I feel that I should affirm that the capitalization is in the original, not added by me. Should I make this affirmation
with a parenthetical comment, or should I just leave it alone?
A. By all means, use a parenthesis to shift the embarrassment to where it belongs. “(Emphasis in original)”
is the standard disclaimer.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Our company, an art auction house, has decided to adopt sentence-style capitalization because we feel the visual flow is
easier to read. The names of sales are based on the names of our departments, e.g., “The Old Master
Paintings department will have its Old master paintings sale in June.” Is that style appropriate?
A. Sentence caps are meant to be used for titles that are in italics or in quotation marks. They don’t
work with titles of sales or departments because, without capital letters to set off an entire title, the lowercased part
of the title blurs with the rest of the sentence. If you like the “down” style,
take it all the way: “The old master paintings department will have its old master paintings sale in
June.” Otherwise, you need headline caps.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]