For those of us who work as editors or writers in the environment of much US publishing, the largest editorial shift in recent months has been the release of the eighteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. The changes between editions of CMoS are not, as a general rule, monumental, but rather incremental, and one would be forgiven for thinking that the new rules and updates represent rather unimportant changes. For most writers, who do not need to concern themselves with the niceties of consistency relegated to the copyeditors and proofreaders, that is largely accurate. But for those of us who do need to know about such things, here are five of the more significant changes.
1. Prepositions of five letters or more are now capitalized in titles. Thus those rather awkward looking titles such as “He Walked through the Park” now look so much more respectable as “He Walked Through the Park.” It’s nice to see the folks over at Chicago taking aesthetics into consideration, even if it means I now have to spend time counting letters.
2. The singular “they” is now endorsed for use for persons “whose gender is unknown or unspecified or concealed.” This is not really much of a change, really, especially as the use of the singular “they” has been more or less accepted in publishing for quite some time (though the jury is still out on “themself,” despite CMoS noting it may be used), and in fact it has been used in English for hundreds of years in situations with ambiguous referents or antecedents.
3. The first letter of any complete sentence following a colon is now capitalized. OK, so that’s not a huge change by most standards, but it’s one that I am particularly happy to see given that I am tired of trying to judge whether the clause preceding the colon is connected only to the immediately following text or to multiple sentences. The old rule dictated that the letter following a colon should only be capitalized if multiple sentences were being indicated, a criterion which is frankly too subjective and franky odd for my taste.
4. The en dash may now be used between two names acting as a compound modifier of a noun, such as the “Ali–Frazier match.” Ah, the glorious en dash, the second best line-like punctuation mark (the best being of course the em dash, and the worst the humble hyphen). In other style guides, such as APA, the en dash is given much freer reign and can be used in most situations meaning “to,” such as the “North–South train,” but also in any compound adjective in which each component has “equal weight,” such as “author–date citations.” Though such constructions have largely been rejected by CMoS, it appears the en dash may be on the up and up.
5. Cities are now omitted from citations of works published after 1900. That’s right, no need to specify that this or that volume was published in New York or Florida. This ought to come as a relief, since no one needs this information to locate a source, and really it’s just taking up space in already crowded bibliographies. Triple em dashes are now no longer used to indicate repeat authors, however, which is, to my mind, only going to make bibliographies that much busier and confusing to look at, but perhaps I’m reactionary.
I could go on of course, as there are dozens of changes in the new edition. These have proved to be the most consistently relevant to my editing work, however, and all the minutiae of the others will take some time to fully integrate and encounter. In the meantime, we can all get back to what really matters—editing and complaining about the new CMoS color scheme (which is truly abysmal).
Ben Woollard 