Q. Dear CMS staff: We are editing a multiauthor scientific book. One of the authors is dedicating his chapter to someone. Generally,
a dedication is part of prelims and belongs to the entire book. I could not find any style for this kind of case. Could you
please suggest how to set this line?
A. Certainly. You can set it as an unnumbered footnote on the first page of the chapter or at the beginning of the endnotes.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Dear Manual of Style: My friend and I are having a disagreement about whether or not “smoking gun” must be hyphenated when used as an adjective (i.e., smoking-gun evidence vs. smoking gun evidence). He believes that it is appropriate to hyphenate, citing CMOS. I believe that when the hyphen is unnecessary to help a reader differentiate a compound adjective from two adjacent adjectives that each independently modify the noun, it is unnecessary to hyphenate (e.g., chocolate chip cookie, high school teacher). Which one of us is correct?
A. I agree with you, but someone has to decide whether the adjectives are safe without the hyphen. If you want to be absolutely sure that no one will think the teacher is high on something or the evidence has been set on fire, you should add a hyphen to “high school” and “smoking gun.”
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I recently mailed a flyer to my tour group and used the phrase “The Pavilion houses the museum’s collection of Japanese works dating from around 3000 b.c. to the twentieth century,” which I had copied from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art web page. After I clicked the Send button I realized the b.c. was in lowercase. Should I email a correction to the museum staff?
A. A correction—or an apology? I checked out the page you refer to, and on my monitor the abbreviation appears in small caps (B.C.). Although this style is fine (we prefer BC), small caps can get lost during the transfer of copy from one electronic platform to another (such as copying and emailing). If you put quotation marks around the phrase and credited the museum’s site, your only crime was a failure to proofread. If you simply pasted without attribution, that’s plagiarism.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Our students often use primary source documents, and now that there are many online archives, we have a wide variety of sources
from which to choose. I am trying to create a style sheet for some of the more difficult citations, and I have discovered
one that does not seem to fit cleanly into any example. The website is actually an HTML version of a periodical/journal article
from 1924. The periodical is part of a special collection archive housed at a university archive. Do I cite it as a periodical
and leave out the university archive connection? Do I cite it as a website and leave out the periodical/journal information?
There does not seem to be an example that would let me include both the archive connection and the journal information.
A. If the CMOS example that comes closest to meeting your needs doesn’t include everything you like, please don’t
take it as a prohibition against adding more information. You might train your students to include the information they think
is interesting, relevant, or helpful, in the order they think best serves the reader.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. If one wished to refer to a particular published article a number of times in one’s own writing, how
would one abbreviate the title, since titles can be lengthy? For example, I see an article: “To Dissect
or Not: Student Choice-in-Dissection Laws Ensure the Freedom to Choose,” published in volume 37, number
2, of the April 2008 edition of Journal of Law & Education, from the University of South Carolina. How would one concisely refer to said title?
A. The first few words should do it: “To Dissect or Not.”
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. When doing footnotes, do you put a footnote after every sentence, even if two or more consecutive sentences are from the
same source and same page? Or can it be assumed that, regardless of the punctuation (as long as it is in the same paragraph),
all that came after the last citation and before the footnote you just inserted is part of the same source and same page?
A. Footnotes should be placed where you need them, not according to a rule. Whenever you can imagine the reader asking “Says
who?” you should add a note. It’s not true that the reader can assume that everything
between one footnote and the next is attributable to the first source, since most writers interject their own arguments or
conclusions between the borrowed materials. If everything in a paragraph is from the same source, however, it’s
enough to put one note at the end of the paragraph.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. In a self-published novel, do you need the permission of a certain company to mention a product name/brand or other trademarked
title?
A. You don’t need permission. Fortunately, we are all free to speak and write about Porsches and Jimmy
Choos whether or not we can afford to buy them.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am editing a nonfiction manuscript of interviews with several fiction writers. The author uses ellipses (fairly often) to indicate a long pause in speech or thought. Is this a correct use of ellipses? How do you differentiate between long pauses and omissions of some lines within the transcribed conversation?
A. Yes, ellipses are properly used to indicate long pauses. If you also use them to indicate omissions, then you need to differentiate them and explain in a note how you do so. One way is to use a plain ellipsis for a pause . . . and a bracketed ellipsis [. . .] for an omission.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. This has become a huge issue with our professors. I am the thesis processor for the school and have stated that “Ibid.” should not be the first footnote on a page. The cited work could be two or more pages back. Does Chicago have a rule on this? The academics state that they have never heard of this, but to me it makes perfect sense for the reader to not have to go back to see what the source was. Please help!
A. CMOS doesn’t address this issue, since it doesn’t arise in preparing manuscripts for typesetting. (That’s because there’s no way to know in advance of typesetting whether text that begins a page in a manuscript will begin a page in the typeset version. It’s not likely.) However, the standard reference for preparing theses, Kate L. Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (which is based on Chicago style), does say to “avoid using ibid. to refer to footnotes that do not appear on the same page” (16.4.2). Note that the use of “avoid” suggests that there may be times when it would be more awkward to avoid it than to do it.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. My book has three parts, and each part contains several chapters. Here is the question: do I need to give full publishing
information in each new chapter for items cited earlier in the same part, or can I use the short version of citing (as I do
within each chapter)?
A. If you have a bibliography, you can put short citations everywhere—there’s no
need to give the full information in the notes. If you don’t have a bibliography, readers are best served
by your starting over in every chapter with a full citation upon first mention (parts are irrelevant). Otherwise, they will
go mad trying to find the original citation.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]