Q. How should one handle mentions of questions, rather than direct expressions of them? As an example, consider this sentence: The question “What is dark energy?” has been a major focus of cosmology for decades. Should there be a comma after “question”? Should the question be set within quotation marks? Should it instead be set in italics? Is there some other format that Chicago would recommend?
A. When a question occurs within another sentence—but not as a form of direct discourse introduced with a verb like asked or wondered—it can usually be treated like any other noun. Whether to use a comma in your example will depend, then, on whether the question itself is restrictive or nonrestrictrive relative to the word question.
If you don’t know what that means, consider these two sentences (and see CMOS 6.30):
The artist Frida Kahlo has been a major focus of self-portraiture studies for decades.
The question What is dark energy? has been a major focus of cosmology for decades.
Just as “Frida Kahlo” is essential to the meaning of the word artist in the first sentence, “What is dark energy?” is essential to the meaning of the word question in the second. In other words, the name and the question are both restrictive, so no commas are needed in either sentence.
If the artist or question has already been introduced, or if either one is preceded by a limiting adjective like this (see also CMOS 5.72)—or if both are true—those same elements become nonrestrictive and are set off by commas. For example:
We were discussing a question that, to date, has no definitive answer. This question, What is dark energy?, has been a major focus of cosmology for decades.
Quotation marks are usually unnecessary for such questions unless you’re quoting someone or something directly. And though italics can be helpful, they aren’t usually necessary either. For the use of a comma following a question mark (which you could avoid in the example above by using dashes or parentheses instead), see CMOS 6.134. For commas with direct questions (with asked or the like), see 6.45.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Is it okay for “%” to be changed to “percent” in quoted text to match the rest of the document, similar to how you can change en dashes to em dashes in CMOS 12.7?
A. It’s better to leave the symbol as is. Readers who look for the original text of a quotation that includes “a 7 percent increase” may have trouble finding the relevant passage if it has “a 7% increase” instead—or, if not, they may wonder what other changes have been made without notice.
By comparison, dashes are dashes. A reader consulting the source of a quotation that included “a 7 percent increase—defying all expectations” is unlikely to be tripped up by finding “a 7 percent increase – defying all expectations.”
In other words, we consider the difference between dashes to be purely typographical, whereas the difference between “%” and “percent” is just beyond that threshold—more like a case of synonyms.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hello! You have a Q&A where a speaker interrupts their own dialogue with an em dash, and your example uses a space before the new sentence: “I thought I might— Oh, it’s no use.” While I understand the logic of the space (the first sentence has ended suddenly; a new one starts), in practice, is there a justification for just closing up the spaces with all such em dashes for expediency and consistency, even if what follows is a complete sentence? Our global manuscript cleanup process would remove that space even if the author had written it in, and I am reluctant to have copyeditors spend time adding the space back in on a case-by-case basis, agonizing over whether the next clause merits a space and a cap (if it’s ambiguous), and so on. Is there room for a house style exception on this, or do you think that the space should be followed as a matter of Chicago style? Thank you for any help!
A. That space after the em dash in “might—” isn’t technically Chicago style; it’s not currently covered in CMOS itself (as of the 18th edition). But as our Q&A implies, we do think the space (followed by an initial capital) is useful—as does Benjamin Dreyer, the author of Dreyer’s English (Random House, 2019; see p. 124).
Still, it’s a small detail that isn’t likely to be missed if it’s not there in the first place. But if you do make an executive decision to clean out spaces after em dashes, consider changing the initial capitals that follow them to lowercase (except in proper nouns or initialisms or the like); absent that space, a capital may look to some readers like a mistake (though maybe less so in styles that put a space before and after a dash):
“I thought I might— Oh, it’s no use.”
becomes
“I thought I might—oh, it’s no use.”
not
“I thought I might—Oh, it’s no use.”
The first example is arguably best; it conveys the self-interruption more definitively than the others do. But if your editing resources are limited, this is one detail that, again, could be left on the cutting-room floor. Just be sure to alert your authors to what you’ve done when you return their copyedited manuscripts for review; they should get a chance to restore any spaces plus initial capitals that they think are mandatory.
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I’m proofreading a manuscript in which a lot of dialogue tags are followed with descriptive verb phrases. But instead of using gerunds to do this (“I like cats,” he said, smiling), the author opts nine times out of ten to use a conjunction (“I like cats,” he said and smiled). In most of these cases, my instinct is to put a comma after the dialogue tag, but I’m unable to find any CMOS rule that applies to this specific instance.
A. A comma in your second example isn’t strictly required; the word “and” introduces the second half of a compound predicate (“smiled”), which is easier to see if you reorganize your example and replace the quoted dialogue with an indefinite pronoun:
He said something and smiled.
But the transition from speaking verb (“said”) to action verb (“smiled”) in the original version of the example is a little abrupt, and we agree with your instinct that a comma after “said” would be helpful:
“I like cats,” he said, and smiled.
For a similar take on this issue, see Amy J. Schneider’s The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2023), 163–64. See also CMOS 6.24 (on commas with compound predicates) and 12.41 (on punctuation with speaker tags).
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Does CMOS have a preference on “said” versus “stated” for attribution?
A. “Said” is more neutral than “stated” and would be the better choice in almost any context; “stated” is more definitive and sounds more formal. As a general principle, if any verb other than “said” is used, make sure it suits the context. For example, “wrote” could work for a written source, and “claimed” might be the right choice for something either written or said that hasn’t been verified (or that may be false). But try not to use a word like “sighed” that isn’t compatible with speech (see CMOS 12.41).
[This answer relies on the 18th edition of CMOS (2024) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am editing a nineteenth-century American diary, and I often want to omit passages that span a paragraph break. If I use, say, the first sentence of the first paragraph, then the second sentence of the second paragraph, how should it look? Using two ellipses looks weird to me. Or maybe I don’t need to indicate the new paragraph at all?
A. If you’re running the quotation in with the surrounding text instead of presenting it as a block quotation, there’s no need to signal the paragraph break; simply use ellipses for the omitted part as recommended in CMOS 13.50, 13.53, and 13.54. But if you’re using a block quotation (as for one hundred words or more), then show the paragraph break as follows:
Let’s pretend that the words in this extract (which is another term for block quotation) have been reproduced from the beginning of the first paragraph of a quoted source. This is the first paragraph continued, but our quotation is interrupted after this sentence—a break that’s signaled after a sentence-ending period by the three spaced dots of a Chicago-style ellipsis, like this. . . .
. . . This is the second sentence from next paragraph of the quoted source. Note how the ellipsis at the beginning of this paragraph (the second ellipsis in this quotation) is preceded by a paragraph indent.
If the second paragraph in the block quotation above had started with the beginning of the quoted paragraph in the original, then the second ellipsis would have been omitted; see CMOS 13.56. But be careful. If the intended meaning of the original text wouldn’t be clear even to readers who haven’t consulted that same source, make adjustments until it is.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. What is the correct way to format this sentence? When she cried, “That’s not fair!,” he merely shrugged. Where would the comma go? Both inside and outside the quotation marks look wrong, as does omitting it altogether.
A. The punctuation in your example makes sense, but the comma after the exclamation point is omitted in dialogue as a matter of convention, even when the sentence structure would seem to require one:
When she cried, “That’s not fair!” he merely shrugged.
But if that looks a little uneven, note also that words that are described or reported as having been said (When she cried) rather than being presented directly as dialogue (She cried) don’t always need an introductory comma—especially in fiction, a subtle but useful distinction explained in more detail by Amy Schneider on pages 164 and 165 of her book The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
Accordingly, you can omit commas entirely from your example, which reads like dialogue but isn’t quite direct discourse:
When she cried “That’s not fair!” he merely shrugged.
Either approach is fine, but if the context is creative and the prose casual, you may want to choose the comma-free second option. See also CMOS 13.14 and 13.15 and, for scenarios in which a comma would follow an exclamation point, 6.125.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I received the following instruction from a production editor regarding a manuscript I was assigned for copyediting: “Only one character speaks British English, and unless he’s in dialogue the spelling should be American.”
I’ve always been under the impression that house style rules and spelling style should be maintained even if a character is British in an American text. How should I approach this?
A. We agree with you. For example, if a British character in an American story referred to the “color” of a particular “jumper,” you would leave the text as is:
“Could I try that jumper in a different color?”
not
“Could I try that jumper in a different colour?”
and not
“Could I try that sweater in a different color?”
The American narrator might refer to that same character’s “sweater,” but generally speaking the principle to follow is this: Retain American spellings for all narrative and dialogue, even for a British character. Vocabulary alone will establish a character’s Britishness or Americanness, as the case may be.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How does one quote from an interview in which the interviewee uses the word “hashtag”? For example, “Anyone can do it, hashtag, write your own story,” with the hashtag being #WriteYourOwnStory.
A. The safest approach—one that will make it immediately clear which words belong to the hashtag—is to use quotation marks, as follows:
“Anyone can do it, hashtag ‘write your own story.’ ”
And note that there’s no need for a comma after the word “hashtag.”
Another option is to omit the quotation marks, a simpler but also less literal approach that’s best suited to dialogue in fiction and other creative contexts:
“We’ve been in the car for five hours now, hashtag are we there yet, hashtag I’m hungry.”
For the use of single quotation marks, as in the first example above, see CMOS 6.11 and 13.30.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I’m writing a book about Civil War recipients of the Medal of Honor, about forty of whom had their narratives reproduced in two postwar books published before 1910. These narratives have also appeared in books that were published more recently and remain under copyright. Can I use the numerous accounts (quoted in the men’s own words) from the earlier editions without obtaining the reprint publisher’s permission?
A. As long as you use only those portions of the text that were published in the older editions—both of which would now be long out of copyright—you won’t need permission to reproduce the content (though you should cite the original sources in a footnote or elsewhere). See also CMOS 4.22.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]