Authors, Titles, and Metadata ✳ Formatting ✳ Illustrations ✳ Permissions, Credits, and Practical Issues ✳ Indexing ✳ Using a Style Manual
Writers and students who are hit with the “Big Orange” for the first time might quail at the idea of applying its thousand-plus pages to their work. But whole chunks of CMOS have nothing to do with slippery issues of style or grammar or citing sources. Much of it covers the more creative decisions involved in putting together a book or article for publication, from how to list the authors to formatting, fonts, illustrations, and indexing. Not that these matters can’t be just as controversial. Any increase in the number of choices available is bound to increase the number of opinions as well.
Q. Dear CMOS Staff, in a recent issue of one of our periodicals, I altered the original lineup of the names of five coauthors appearing under the title of an article and reordered them alphabetically. One of the coauthors is unhappy with this and requests, too late, to keep the original lineup, which, I assume, implicitly establishes some hierarchy in authorship. What should be my response to the unhappy coauthor?
A. Your response should be groveling apologies and a promise to issue a correction in the next issue of the journal and in the online version. Name order is important to authors in certain disciplines, as it indicates who is the lead author. It is meaningful to anyone who reads the paper or sees the citation on a résumé. Sometimes employment and promotion depend on having published a certain number of articles as the lead author. This is a truly regrettable error—the kind of error that can put the reputation of your periodical into question. Please make every effort to make amends.
Q. I thought at one point it was considered bad taste to include an author’s degree on the front cover of a book (Steve Smith, PhD). But now I am wondering if that is the case. Any input? Is it just an individual decision?
A. It depends. It’s unwarranted in scholarly writing, but if a book is for a mass audience and the degree gives potential readers an idea of the writer’s qualifications, some publishers will want it stated: for instance, on a diet book written by a doctor, or a book on orchids written by a botanist. The author and editor should consult with the publisher’s marketing department to decide what’s best.
Q. I have written a book with twelve other authors. One of the authors is also the editor of the book. He has listed himself first as author/editor. I am thinking the authors should be listed first in alphabetical order and then the editor. Is this correct?
A. There’s a fine old tradition for the authors to fight this out. Your suggestion would work, assuming that the entire book was authored by all twelve. If the book is a collection of chapters by individual authors, however, it’s more conventional to list only the editor on the title page. The other authors appear in the table of contents and are perhaps listed on the book jacket flaps or back cover, depending on how famous they are.
Q. When a subsequent edition of a book is being published, is it proper to make any changes to the title of the book, or should the title appear exactly the same in all editions?
A. There’s no law against changing the title of a book, but it can be awkward—think of the confusion. Everywhere the new title appears, it will have to be clarified: Persuading with Power (3rd edition of A Woman’s Guide to People-Pleasing). Generally it’s not a good idea unless for some reason the old title has become hopelessly out of date or offensive or problematic in some other way to the extent that confusion is preferable to retaining the old title.
Q. When the original author of a book has died and the original book is being revised by others, what is the best way to handle this on the title page? Should the original author be mentioned at all?
A. Horrors! When writers die, others don’t get to grab their stuff and claim it belongs to them. The original writer is the only one whose name is required on the title page; the revisers’ names come second (“Revised by”) and are optional. If they want to be on a title page, tell them to write their own stuff.
Q. In terms of full or ragged-edge justification of documents, which one is preferred for which type of document: business letter, research paper, sales and marketing materials?
A. Full justification is most often appropriate for typeset materials that have been professionally designed. All other materials should be ragged. In many cases you can judge for yourself: if full justification causes some lines to stretch out and others to squish together even when automatic hyphenation is turned on, it’s better to go ragged.
Q. Does it matter what font style and size are used when submitting an essay for contest consideration?
A. Contest rules usually give guidelines for submitting work. Otherwise, it is standard in publishing to use 12-point type in a serifed font like Times New Roman. Use one-inch margins on all sides, no colors, no ALL CAPS anywhere. Indent the first line of each paragraph. Don’t add space between paragraphs. Type a single space between sentences (not two). Editors want the text to be clear and to speak for itself. Prose decorated with bold and italics and caps looks unprofessional. If you are entering a contest, good luck!
Q. Does the font size of the footnotes need to be reduced in comparison to the main text font size?
A. In a manuscript, everything should be the same size. In a published document (whether typeset on paper or posted online), notes are usually set in smaller type.
Q. About two spaces after a period. As a US Marine, I know that what’s right is right and you are wrong. I declare it once and for all aesthetically more appealing to have two spaces after a period. If you refuse to alter your bullheadedness, I will petition the commandant to allow me to take one Marine detail to conquer your organization and impose my rule. Thou shalt place two spaces after a period. Period. Semper Fidelis.
A. As a US Marine, you’re probably an expert at something, but I’m afraid it’s not this. Status quo.
Q. All right then! I’m steadfastly attempting to adopt the “one space after concluding punctuation” rule. It’s not an easy task for a retired English teacher in his late sixties—one who preached the old rule to legions of eager-eyed scholars. Are there any retraining suggestions that assist the elder learner? I’m tired of correcting my continual errors. I am diligently trying, though.
A. Good for you! The easiest way might be for you to leave the mistakes in place until the document is finished, then use the Find and Replace feature to eliminate all double spaces. In the Find box, type two spaces, and in the Replace With box, type one space. Hit Replace All—and you’re done. (And eventually, when your word processor regularly tells you that the search item was not found, celebrate!)
Q. Can you call out a figure from a subsequent section? For example, can you make a first reference to figures 3.9 through 3.12 in section 2.4? My stance is that you can’t make a first-reference callout from the future, only from the current or a previous section. Calling out subsequent sections and appendixes (but not tables and figures) seems somehow different and not subject to this rule, which I might well have unknowingly made up.
A. This is one of many situations where it’s not helpful to consider the general rule to be inflexible. If certain figures are mainly discussed in chapter 3 but the writer wants to point forward to them in chapter 2, it’s perverse to either not allow it or force the writer to move the figures to chapter 2, away from the main discussion. Writers organizing a book should number the figures in the order they are discussed in the text, but after that, they should be able to refer to them anywhere the figures enhance the discussion.
Q. Is there a preferred way to refer in text to a specific column or row in a table? I tend to reuse the text in the column heading or stub entry rather than a number, just because I think it’s clearer that way. For example, “See ‘Countries’ column” rather than “See column 4.” Is that wrong?
A. Not at all. Some tables have numbered rows and columns, in which case “See column 4” is a perfect way to refer to the column. But a reference to a column number when the column heading is a word or phrase would not always be clear (e.g., which is column 1: the table stub or the first column after the stub?), and in a table with many columns, the reader would be forced to count the columns to find the data.
Q. I am using the double-numeration system recommended for heavily illustrated books (e.g., 4.1 for chapter 4, illustration 1). My problem is that there are two figures in the book’s preface, which comes before an introduction without illustrations. Numbering such as P.1 or 0.1 could look awkward. How might I number those illustrations?
A. Both of your suggestions are commonly used. Neither is very pretty, but they are practical.
Q. This problem came up when copyediting a journal: on a page that is occupied by a broadside image and has a single footnote (to the caption of the image), should the footnote be oriented the same as the image and caption (i.e., 90 degrees from normal), or should it stay as regular?
A. It’s not usual to footnote a caption rather than simply run the note into the caption with “Note:” in front of it, so you won’t find a rule for this in CMOS. But to compound the oddity by having two strings of text at right angles to each other is probably not a good idea. It’s almost always best, if possible, to set all the type on a page in such a way that it can be read continuously without turning the book.
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.
Q. A book endorsement was given by a bishop who has since been elevated to cardinal. The book will soon be reprinted (second edition). Should the endorsement printed on the back cover change to reflect his new title? Or should it remain as it was at the time the endorsement was given?
A. This is more of a marketing issue than editorial, and CMOS is silent on the subject. I believe marketing practice is to quietly update affiliations, since fancier titles are more impressive. If the statement is long out of date or very controversial, however, consider whether you might misrepresent the opinion of the blurber, in which case using the old affiliation (or a renewed statement from the blurber) would better represent the truth.
Q. I work at a major children’s book publisher and have recently noticed a trend in creating books without any blanks at the end of the book. I would like to know if there is a rule on how many back-of-book blank pages are permissible in standard works of fiction (young-adult and middle-grade novels). At various adult publishers, I was taught that up to six pages is acceptable and that having at least a couple of blanks is actually preferable in order to allow for potential changes and additions during pass stages. But I can’t seem to find anything online or in CMOS to support that. Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this.
A. In conventional offset printing, large sheets of paper are folded into “signatures” of usually 16 or 32 pages (sometimes 8, or even 48) that are bound together and trimmed to make a book. For this reason, books have a page count that is a multiple of at least 8, and usually 16. Children’s picture books have long been paged at 24, 32, 48, or 64 pages. Middle-grade books page out at larger multiples. Having blank pages in a book isn’t a goal; it is simply unavoidable if the text and illustrations can’t fill all the available space. And since it’s expensive to tear out extra pages by hand, publishers turn a blind eye to the blanks. Digital printing doesn’t involve these large sheets of paper, so if you are seeing a lot of self-published or print-on-demand books, they probably won’t have any leftover pages.
Q. Hello. I’ve been charged with editing the credits in a new history textbook, but I’d like to know what you think should be done for crediting montage photographs. This is where two or more photographs have been morphed into one image for printing. Putting all the illustration credits on one line without some sort of distinguishing mark or word would make it difficult for interested persons to tell which part of the montage came from what company or photographer. What solution or alternative do you suggest?
A. Sometimes the pieces of a montage can be identified with terms like “clockwise from upper left” or “top, left to right; center, left to right; bottom, left to right.” An alternative is to make a small line drawing of the components and number them so the credits can be keyed to the numbers. For elements superimposed or blended beyond distinction, there’s not much point in trying to sort them out; just list the credits in alphabetical order. If it’s essential to match each credit to its original, you might have to print thumbnail images of the original art as a guide.
Q. I work at a university press, and during a meeting of project editors we had a disagreement about the correct placement of the glossary. CMOS recommends that the glossary appear between the notes and bibliography. Although we’ll accept this as your final answer, our question is why? Thank you!
A. Like many of the rules in CMOS, this one was begotten lo those many years ago. In an early edition of the Manual, the glossary was placed just so, and then that edition begat the next. The next edition begat the following one, and the following one begat the one after, and so on down unto these very days. Obviously, someone at the dawn of time thought it was a good idea, and no one in all the generations since has found reason to mess with it. And so that is why.
Q. I know that endnotes are indexed. But which page number is listed—the page where the callout occurs, or the page where the actual endnote appears? If the latter, all subjects in endnotes on that page will have the same page number . . . the endnote page. Is that correct?
A. That’s right. The idea of an index is to tell the reader where to locate the information. If you point her to the page of the callout, she will find nothing there but a callout, and she won’t know the page number of the corresponding endnote, so she’ll have to browse through the endnotes to find the right one. It’s much more efficient (and kinder) to send her directly to the page where the note appears (along with the note number, of course).
Q. How should I index the name Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo?
A. In the absence of other information or advice (such as from the author), index unfamiliar unhyphenated names in the usual way, under the last name listed—in this case, Mbasogo. CMOS 16.71–87 covers rules for indexing special types of personal names.
Q. My indexing partner included names in the acknowledgments section in his index nominum. The text goes, “I am indebted to X and Z for materials or conversation that assisted my research for this article.” Including X and Z in the index seems unnecessary to me. What do you think?
A. While it may not be necessary to include certain names in an index, it’s common to allow a certain number of “vanity” entries, if there is room. This writer would like his colleagues or mentors to see their names when they look for them, and evidently he wasn’t able to cite them in a more substantive way in the book.
Q. I’m creating a name index for a book on the history of Japanese imperial rule, which is heavy on references to Japanese deities. The deities are discussed numerous times in connection with the early Japanese emperors, for example as part of the first emperor’s lineage. I believe only people should be in the name index, but are there any exceptions, such as this one?
A. If you are the author of the book, you get to decide what to put in your index. If you’re writing the index for someone else, that person is the best one to decide. If deities are to be included, you might rename the index “Index of Persons and Deities.” Or you could have a separate glossary of deities. Don’t worry about conventions and exceptions. Think about what the readers of this book will need, and then create it for them.
Q. Hello! When indexing a book that names the same person literally hundreds of times (it’s about this person’s philosophy), is passim correct in the index? Same Q about his works; some of the famous works are named or referenced dozens, if not hundreds of times.
A. Imagine yourself using this index to find something. What good is passim? A reader already knows that X is mentioned throughout the book. Professional indexers disagree whether it even makes sense to have an entry for the main subject of a book, but if you do, it must be broken up into many subentries and possibly sub-subentries, so readers can find what they’re after. (In fact, any index entry that consists of more than five or six page numbers should be further broken down into subentries.) Some indexers of biographies create an entry for the person’s name, but within it they list only passages that relate to the person’s life events (birth, marriage, death), which could not easily be listed elsewhere in the index. Some indexers also put under the person’s name “Works. See titles of individual works.” Your questions show that you would profit from learning more about indexing before you go further. I suggest you read the indexing chapter of CMOS.
Q. Somewhere I picked up the “fact” that the numbering system used in the Chicago Manual of Style was modeled after that of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Is this “fact” a fact or have I slipped a cog? Is it mentioned in the CMOS?
A. Holy metaphysics—we aren’t that fancy. CMOS simply numbers each paragraph, starting over in each chapter; section 7.85 is the eighty-fifth paragraph of chapter 7. Wittgenstein’s system provides a complex nesting of his statements about his seven propositions. In the Tractatus, proposition 6 is elaborated in section 6.1, which is further elaborated in 6.11, and even further in 6.111. Thus you can read across levels for surface understanding, or down into them for greater detail.
Q. I am the first and only technical writer at this company. Since they do not have any style guides, I know legally there are no issues in using the Chicago Manual of Style. But is it legally OK to use the Microsoft Manual of Style?
A. I suppose that depends what you use it for. (How heavy is it?)
Q. Will there ever be a word processing program designed to use only The Chicago Manual of Style?
A. If you could put all the monkeys in the world on all the computers in the world, with all the tech consultants in the world, maybe, at some point in infinity, there would be such a program.