How in heaven's name does one attempt to review the brand-new
16th edition of The Chicago Manual of
Style (University of Chicago Press, Aug. 1, 2010)? Compare "the 3-em
dash for an institutional name" from (or between?) the 15th and 16th
editions? Or just browse, as one sometimes does in a dictionary: "SI units--form
(10.55)"; "Greek word division--consecutive vowels (11.138)"; "serial
commas (6.18)." Even Stephen Colbert cares about this stuff--as he said
recently on the Colbert Report (titles
of television programs: 8.185), he believes in the serial comma, as does
the CMOS. (We got lost there trying
to figure out where the parentheses [6.92] go in relation to the section
numbers in relation to section names.)
Fortunately, Ellen Gibson, marketing manager, reference and regional, helped us make sense of the new 16th edition. She said, "The most interesting aspect of the growing sales and presence of The Chicago Manual of Style in the marketplace is that in this time of supposedly diminishing interest in careful punctuation and writing, we continue to sell tens of thousands of copies of the Manual each year, and our total sales of the 15th edition were near a quarter million copies. (We also have thousands of subscribers to our online edition of the Manual, which launched three years ago.)" Even more--CMOS has a Facebook page and a Twitter account (@ChicagoManual).
Gibson also cited Carol Saller's blog, The Subversive Copyeditor. Saller is the mind behind the Chicago Style Q&A (which has more than 30,000 subscribers). Her blog offers information on new rules and retired rules for the new edition, as well as an extended interview with the principal reviser, Russell Harper. Some excerpts:
Saller: So, Russell, tell me: when you were asked to revise CMOS for the 16th edition, did you have any fears or reservations, and if so, what were they, and did you get over them?
Harper: Well yes. My first fear was for my family. I knew the Manual well, and I knew what a revision would mean. (They survived.) Next, I worried for my safety. My third-floor office at the time—in the attic of a hundred-year-old house in Ithaca, New York—trembled and swayed whenever a city bus or fire truck passed by (about every twenty minutes). So I resolved to make daily backups of every stage of the manuscript to a variety of off-site servers, leaving passwords and instructions with a close and highly literate family member across the Atlantic.
Saller: One of the most interesting and satisfying aspects of the revision process was the way in which [issues were] broached and settled in passionate but civilized group e-mailings. Looking at my archive, I can see messages titled "I'm probably hallucinating," "Prissy distinctions," "Tearing my hair o'er Gruyère," and on one day, fifteen messages between you and [members of the copyediting team] with the subject heading "Consistency issue with (not) examples."
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I seem to recall that when you finished the first draft of the revision, you sent it to everyone on the CMOS Board of Advisors as well as the in-house team, who individually marked it up and sent it back to you. Somehow you read and responded to two dozen versions of the thing, all with no doubt conflicting suggestions.
Harper: And don't forget that you and the rest of the in-house team and the board reviewed and commented on my detailed proposal, well before any work started on the revision....There was a lot of animated debate (one editor said to me in the nicest way possible that she'd had the urge to slap me--something involving titles by Raymond Carver and the Beatles).
On her blog, Carol also features the major changes in CMOS. Here are three of the biggest (besides the familiar cover color):
1. The Manual's chapters were overdue for reorganization, so now there are three parts. Part I deals with publishing processes (manuscript prep, editing, proofing, figures and tables, permissions); part II with style and usage (punctuation, spelling, numbers, abbreviations, grammar); and part III with documentation (notes, bibliographies, indexing).
2. The original paragraph titles were not written with computer searching in mind; now, each is titled specifically--e.g., "Portuguese capitalization." Many paragraph titles were rewritten to be more helpful. Saller said that such subtle changes might not be noticed by reviewers, but regular users will note that it's easier to find things now.
3. CMOS 16 brings author-date documentation style into stylistic line with notes-bibliography style. In a 140-character Twitter challenge, she explained it this way: Spell out author names; headline-case titles; italicize book titles; put article titles in quotation marks.
If you work with words or love language, The Chicago Manual of Style is one book you definitely need on your shelf. (When does one use US as opposed to U.S.? How do you alphabetize Spanish and Japanese names?--the bane of bookstores). But, really, in addition to its usefulness, it just looks so cool and authoritative on a bookshelf. Instant gravitas (7.49).--Marilyn Dahl