Q. In the following sentence, would you stet the comma before “then”? “I’ll just come at the end of May, then.”

A. When then is used as an adverb to mean “in that case,” a comma can be helpful but isn’t strictly required. If you prefer close punctuation (i.e., a liberal use of commas), then you may want to retain such a comma. If you prefer an open style (with fewer commas), you can usually leave it out. (See also CMOS 6.16.) Whatever your style, you should retain a comma whenever then might be misread as “at that time.”

This use of then is analogous to the use of too and either in the sense of also (see CMOS 6.56 and “Commas with ‘Too’ and ‘Either’ ” at CMOS Shop Talk). Some writers always add a comma before that kind of too or either (or two commas in the middle of a sentence); others use a comma only rarely, as when ambiguity threatens (unlikely with too or either) or to add emphasis.

Either approach, consistently and thoughtfully applied, can work well. Alrighty then, on to the next question.

Q. Is it “the angel Gabriel” or “the Angel Gabriel”?

A. Though it’s not exactly a job title, an angel can usually be treated like a writer or a poet relative to capitalization: Just as you would refer to the writer Jane Austen or the poet Maya Angelou (lowercase w and p), you’d refer to the angel (or archangel) Gabriel (lowercase a).

Q. Do typefaces or fonts used in a book or other document need to be credited? CMOS 4.106 makes me think they should, but maybe I misunderstood something.

A. That paragraph in CMOS is about crediting words and images borrowed from other sources and incorporated into your own work. Fonts* are in a different category. Any font licensed for public use that you’ve acquired legally can usually be used without credit.

This includes, for example, the fonts from Google Fonts, which can be downloaded for free and used in your publications or other documents without attribution (like Source Serif 4, the font used for the main text on this page); for details, see the Google Fonts FAQ page.

It also includes fonts acquired from Adobe, some of which are free (including the same Source Serif 4 family) and others of which require a Creative Cloud subscription or other type of purchase (see this page on font licensing from Adobe; there are some restrictions, but none of these involve giving credit to Adobe).

Not that you can’t give credit. Printed books often acknowledge fonts and their designers in a colophon, a brief statement (usually at the end) about details related to the book’s production. The one in CMOS can be found at the end of the printed book (and on the page that follows the entries for the letter z in the index at CMOS Online).

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* Traditionally speaking, a name like Garamond or Times refers to a typeface, whereas font refers to an assortment of characters for one of these typefaces in a specific size and style (e.g., italic). These days, the shorter word (font) is commonly used for both typeface and font.

Q. The hyphenation guide at CMOS 7.96 (in sec. 2, under “adjective + noun”) lists “a top-ten school” as containing a compound modifier that needs a hyphen. But would “top ten” always be considered a compound modifier when it appears in front of a noun? For example, in the case of “the top ten schools on the list” (or any construction of “the top ten schools”), would you still recommend hyphenating?

A. That’s a very good question! A top-ten school means a school that is among the top ten schools on a ranked list. In the first expression, top-ten is a compound modifier and is therefore hyphenated; in the second, the phrase top ten simply means first ten, so no hyphen is needed.

Only rarely would the phrase the top ten schools need a hyphen, as when top-ten is being used as a category—a scenario that would be more likely with singular school: Harvard, the top-ten school most commonly selected by students planning to major in political science, is in Cambridge.

Q. I know that there’s a rule that says if two adjectives can be joined by the word and without affecting the meaning, then you should separate the two adjectives with a comma. But sometimes a hyphen seems like the better choice. For example: “a historical-philosophical context” or “military-political involvement.” Do you agree?

A. The hyphens in historical-philosophical and military-political imply a mix of factors that’s more complex than what and would suggest—more of an intersection than a pair of attributes. If that’s what you intend, keep the hyphens rather than replacing them with commas.

These adjectives are equivalent to a term like socioeconomic, in which the word social in social-economic has become the combining form socio- and joins with economic to become one word (some of these terms retain their hyphens; see CMOS 7.96, sec. 2, under “combining forms”).

In fact, the similar term historicophilosophical is entered in Wiktionary and makes an appearance as an example under historico- in Merriam-Webster, so you could consider using that form instead of historical-philosophical (though you could retain the hyphen in this unwieldy compound for the sake of legibility: historico-philosophical).

There’s no established combining form for military, but military-political works well. Or you could try politico-military, as entered in Wiktionary.

Q. If you paraphrase or summarize and it is not a direct quote, do you include the page number in the citation?

A. Yes. In fact, it can be more important to cite page numbers when you paraphrase or summarize than when you quote, especially if the source of the info is longer than a few pages. Words reproduced in a verbatim quotation will almost always be easier to locate in the original than words and ideas approximated by paraphrase or summary.

Q. Hello, I’ve hunted around for an answer to this question and haven’t quite found it. I often cite multiple editions of the same book in my work. My understanding is that footnotes for repeated citations don’t typically list the year, but this would seem to leave ambiguous which edition of the text I’m citing. How should I resolve this to ensure my footnotes are clear? Thanks!

A. If a shortened citation is ambiguous, then don’t hesitate to add info that would make it unambiguous. Assuming the title remains the same for each edition of the book you’re citing, all citations after the first can be in shortened form. For example, if you were citing multiple editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, you might have the following footnotes:

1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855). Except as noted otherwise, this and other editions of Leaves of Grass cited herein are from The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, https://whitmanarchive.org/.

2. Leaves of Grass, 1856 ed.

3. Leaves of Grass, 1881–82 ed.

4. Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.

A shortened note for a book with numbered editions could include the edition number alone or the edition number plus year of publication (after the title or other shortened form): “3rd ed. (1987).”

For the use of italics for the title of The Walt Whitman Archive—which we’re treating as a collected work rather than as a website, though it’s both—see CMOS 14.103. For more on shortened citations, see 13.32–39 and especially 13.37, which includes an example of a title-only citation like the ones in notes 2–4 above.