Monday, January 05, 2004
The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition
Book Review
The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 956 + xviii pages. ISBN 0226104036 (hardcover). US$55.00.
If you’re a writer, an editor, or a translator or a copywriter, a graphic designer, a proofreader, or an indexer who does work destined for North American markets, you need The Chicago Manual of Style on your bookshelf, right next to the dictionary. Even if your copy of Chicago 14 still looks pristine, you need a copy of Chicago 15: since its guidelines reflect current style, technology, and professional practice, your clients and colleagues will be turning to it for guidance in publishing everything from print books to electronic journals.
Because so much of Chicago 15‘s content is new or has been extensively updated or expanded, you ought to plan to do something that you may not have done since getting your first copy of Chicago: read it once from cover to cover to get acquainted with the breadth of its guidance. Be prepared for surprises: its guidelines occasionally reflect current style a little too faithfully. For instance, rule 2.11 advises you what to do ‘if you have problems converting from one software to another.’ (Googling on software + count noun confirms that software is still a mass noun, so you convert from one software-program format to another.)
The most touted new feature of Chicago 15 is its chapter on grammar and usage, chapter 5. Unfortunately, chapter 5 won’t teach you how to recognize and correct problems of subject-verb disagreement, dangling or misplaced modifiers, or missing antecedents. Its grammar coverage consists largely of definitions of the parts of speech and catalogues of their properties, and advice ranges from the esoteric (e.g., a paragraph on ergative verbs) to the elementary (e.g., admonitions like ‘The first-person singular pronoun I is always capitalized no matter where it appears in the sentence’). (When it comes to resolving grammar puzzles, the third edition of Words into Type [1974] is more helpful than Chicago 15.)
The usage section of chapter 5 consists of a long glossary of troublesome expressions and a brief list of prepositional idioms. The glossary’s entries range from long-standing victims of abuse like faze/phase, lay/lie, and masterful/masterly to newer victims seen regularly on Web sites and mailing lists, such as graduate (not the often-seen ‘she graduated college’), home in (not hone in), and peak/peek/pique. Because the prepositional-idiom list is so short, many of us will still turn to Words into Type (whose list is five times as long as Chicago 15’s) or the 1997 edition of The BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations (with several thousand times more entries).
Throughout Chicago 15, updated material specifically addresses questions related to electronic manuscript processing and publishing. For example, the chapter on manuscript preparation and editing sports a new section on editing online, which is twice as long as its section on editing on paper. The copyright chapter now points out that ‘the right of public display [one of four basic copyrights] is becoming increasingly important to publishers insofar as online publishing constitutes ‘display’ of [a] work’ and offers greatly expanded definitions of subsidiary rights, including electronic rights. In the updated chapter on spelling, distinctive treatment of words, and compounds, Chicago 14’s easily scanned, 13-page, columnar table ‘Spelling Guide for Compound Words and Words with Prefixes and Suffixes’ has been replaced with a 7-page, paragraph-style ‘Hyphenation Guide for Compounds, Combining Forms, and Prefixes’ that is not as easy to parse.
Among the most welcome changes in the latest Chicago are the updating and reorganization of the chapters on documentation. The first of these is now limited to briefly introducing the basic patterns of the notes-and-bibliography and author-date systems of documentation. The second covers specific subject matter and types of sources (e.g., print books, electronic journals, DVD-ROMs) at length, giving in a single location examples that are tailored to both systems, with each example clearly labeled N (note), B (bibliography), T (author-date-style text), or R (author-date-style reference list). The guidance in the second chapter is so up-to-date and accessible that most of us will no longer need to consult the current edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (1998) for help with citing electronic sources.
Anyone already familiar with Chicago’s rules for punctuation, capitalization, and so on will appreciate the selection of 30 major changes (affecting 83 rules) highlighted on one page of the Chicago 15 Web site (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/about.newrules.html). Unfortunately, one of these changes’‘With lowercase letters used as letters, an apostrophe is used in the plural form (e.g., x‘s and y‘s).’‘may further confuse those who think that English plurals are formed by the addition of ‘s to a singular noun. In another update covered on this page, short ordinals have been dropped: except in legal citation, 2nd and 3rd are now officially preferred to 2d and 3d. Among startling changes cited on this page are those that call for elimination of small caps in text, replacing them with lowercase characters (e.g., a.m. becoming a.m.) or with full caps (e.g., a.d. becoming AD). While those changes make sense for certain kinds of electronic publishing (e.g., Web pages, low-fidelity PDFs), in which it is difficult or impossible to reproduce readable small caps, they are less welcome for print and high-fidelity electronic publications; in particular, the adoption of full caps makes for eyesores in print publishing: because the capital letters of most typefaces are tall, clumps of caps often look like dark blotches on a page.
Chicago 15’s copyright chapter, a third longer than that in the previous edition, includes an updated and expanded section on the doctrine of fair use. The chapter on abbreviations, almost a third longer than that in the previous edition, offers a greatly expanded table of miscellaneous abbreviations in technological and scientific fields; but the criteria for inclusion of terms are not clear. For instance, the GIF image-file format is included but the JPEG format is not, even though it is more widely used than GIF on the World Wide Web.
Excluding the index, Chicago 15 is just ten pages longer than Chicago 14, which means that the new chapter and the expanded coverage come at a cost. For example, Chicago 15’s chapters on proofreading and indexing are considerably shorter than those of Chicago 14. The indexing chapter covers only preparation of indexes with the aid of software and tells users to consult Chicago 13 or 14 if an index must be prepared ‘the old-fashioned way.’ Reflecting major technological shifts in publishing, Chicago 14’s two substantial chapters on production and printing, together with its generous glossary, have been greatly abbreviated and relegated to an appendix. Sadly, the surviving glossary is not only skimpy but also includes erroneous definitions: e.g., a descender is the portion of a character that extends below the baseline (not below the x-height) and the height of small caps is not always equal to a font’s x-height.
Unlike its predecessors, Chicago 15 is not proving to be immediately likable. To be honest, in many ways its quality falls short of that of previous editions. The two-color printing used throughout this edition is a growing irritant: everything printed in the pale blue-gray ink is difficult to read because of the low contrast between ink and paper; much of the blue-gray printing is out of register in my copy, so that the in-line examples in chapter 5 bounce up and down dizzily beside the explanatory text in black ink; and in many places the blue-gray ink has been printed so faintly that the top half of each line cannot be read. Nor is the book as well proofread as previous editions?errors include grammar and usage faults, wrong figure references, examples that fail to exemplify, typos (‘coeacient’ in two successive entries is particularly noticeable), and failure to follow the rules it is expounding (e.g., rule 6.102 specifies the use of brackets within parentheses, but the example of compounds with ‘like’ [on page 306] uses parentheses within parentheses). However, the typefaces used for the book, Martin Majoor’s Scala (1991) and Scala Sans (1993), are a great improvement on those used in previous editions, and examples are far easier to spot now that they are no longer set in the same typeface as the text.
Users who register (free of charge) on the can search the full text of Chicago 15 for specific terms. This service is an excellent complement to the printed index. Registered users are also eligible for discounts on electronic versions of Chicago 15.
From Newsletter Number 103 (November 2003)