Since 1997, readers of The Chicago Manual of Style’s website have been submitting style and grammar questions to the Q&A page that is updated each month by manuscript editors at the University of Chicago Press. Before there was a website, we occasionally answered questions over the phone. Not that we actively solicited such queries; in fact, to be honest, they could be a little annoying. After all, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to call up a major university press and expect an editor there to stop what she’s doing and determine whether nonfat takes a hyphen. (It doesn’t.) Nevertheless, that’s what we used to do, at no charge. A bonus for us was that sometimes we ended up having interesting conversations with curious strangers who cared as much as we did about a point of grammar or about formatting a citation properly. Occasionally, a conversation led to an improvement in the recommendations we offer in the Manual.
After we discontinued the phone-query service and invited the entire planet to seek our advice online, demand quickly exceeded our ability to answer and still meet our deadlines. So we decided to choose a few of the most interesting questions and answer them in a monthly online Q&A. The posted questions and answers go into an archive that is searchable to anyone with an Internet connection. The archive contains only questions that were featured in the Q&A; regrettably, many more remain unanswered. We are often asked why we don’t provide a help line to serve a greater number of readers. The answer is simple: all our advice is given by senior editors with years of experience at the Press—“power users” of CMOS who have personally assisted with revising the Manual into new editions. They already have their hands full editing the more than three hundred new books we publish each year, and we aren’t willing to settle for helpers with less expertise.
As you might imagine, among the questions readers submit, we get some doozies. The Chicago Manual of Style’s thousand-plus pages of style and grammar and citation guidelines can bewilder a person whose teacher or boss drops the book on their desk and says, “Follow this.” We do our best to help: The book (both print and online) has detailed tables of contents at the start of each chapter. It has a killer index. The online edition is fully searchable, and there’s a free online “Quick Guide” that gives examples of how to cite many of the most common types of sources as a note or in a bibliography. And yet we get questions. Endless, inventive, heartbreaking. Reading through the questions in this book, you will see for yourself the range of topics addressed, the diverse experience of the questioners, and the ease or difficulty with which we articulate our answers.
This book is arranged in categories that loosely reflect those on the Browse Q&A page at CMOS Online. The categories at the website have accumulated willy-nilly over the years and admittedly range from helpful to tongue-in-cheek. Since many of the questions fall into more than one category, the best way to find all the Q&As in this book that touch on a specific subject is to consult the index at the back of the book.
Finally, a caveat: over the years, the Q&A has developed a . . . voice. It’s not that we set out to be cheeky. We have boundless and sincere empathy for anyone who struggles with using what readers affectionately call the “Big Orange” (for its signature tomato-red cover), and we can’t help but respect those who are motivated to find our site and send us a question. But occasionally—mostly in the rush of trying to answer as many questions as we can in spare time that is truly spare—we snap.
Fortunately for us, our readers are loyal, forgiving, and fun-loving. Tens of thousands subscribe to the monthly e-mail alert that a new Q&A list has been posted, and many write to express delight and appreciation. And even though the content presented in this book is available online, we regularly receive requests for a Best of the Q&A book.
Here it is—thank you for asking! (And yes, you can start a sentence with but.)
Carol Fisher Saller, Q&A Editor
Chicago Manual of Style Online