New Questions and Answers
Q. I use Microsoft Word and it has a “reference” feature that does part of the work of endnotes/footnotes for the author. The reference feature uses a smaller font than regular and doesn’t indent the information in the endnote. Should I use the reference feature, or should I do this manually, keyboarding in the information the same way I do the rest of the manuscript?
A. If you have a lot of notes, it makes sense to use the reference feature. That way, if a note is added or deleted during editing, you won’t have to renumber all the rest of the notes by hand—they’ll renumber automatically. You can easily change the font size of the notes text and add the indent, and with only a few keystrokes you can set all the numbers on the line with periods after. You might want to look at The Microsoft Word 2007 Bible, ed. Herb Tyson (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2007), to learn a few tricks like this.
Q. What’s the difference, if any, between the words existing and preexisting? Isn’t the prefix pre- redundant?
A. You can use pre- in ways that are redundant, but it’s a valid prefix, and preexisting has its own meaning. For instance, if you want to describe dinosaurs in relation to humans, existing doesn’t work, but preexisting does.
Q. Microsoft Word says that I need to put an apostrophe in the word students in the following sentence. Why? Where is the possessive? “We will be enrolling new students right up to the day school starts.”
A. Grammar-checking software is still relatively clueless. I think Word decided that right is a noun in your sentence, probably because in its unbending mind “up to the day” looks like a prepositional phrase modifying right. (Perhaps right up is a little too colloquial to compute in Word’s dictionary.) So Word thinks you are enrolling the right of new students (students’ right), up to the day school starts. Luckily, you know what you mean.
Q. CMOS 7.55. Italics at first occurrence: “If a foreign word not listed in an English dictionary is used repeatedly throughout a work, it need be italicized only on its first occurrence. If it appears only rarely, however, italics may be retained.” What’s your reasoning?
A. I can’t divine the reasoning of the original framers of this advice, but the convention makes sense to me as a reader. When a foreign term is introduced, the italics signal that it isn’t a typo—it’s a word from a strange language. Once we get the idea—once we learn the word—repeated italics become distracting. If the word occurs only occasionally, however, we might not learn it (especially if there are many foreign terms in the document). In that case, the italics are appropriate for what remains a foreign term.
Q. I am editing a festschrift, and the authors have asked to include a dedication to the person whom the festschrift is honoring. However, there is already a preface that discusses the person being honored (as well as a foreword), and I’m wondering if this may be overkill.
A. I agree with you. By its nature, the book is dedicated to the honoree. If the authors have special wording they wish to include, they could incorporate it into the end of the preface after an appropriately laudatory wind-up.
Q. In the citation of the following newspaper showing various issues and page numbers, would it be written like this? Southern Patriot, 20 January 1835, 3, 27 January 1835, 3, 30 January 1835, 3, 2 February 1835, 3, 3 February 1835, 3, 3 March 1835, 3, and 19 March 1835, 3.
A. No. I’m afraid my vision began to blur when I came to “1835, 3, 27.” This calls for the deployment of what Lynne Truss calls “a kind of Special Policeman in the event of comma fights,” that is, the semicolon (Eats, Shoots & Leaves [New York: Gotham Books, 2004], 125). Southern Patriot, 20 January 1835, 3; 27 January 1835, 3; 30 January 1835, 3; 2 February 1835, 3; 3 February 1835, 3; 3 March 1835, 3; and 19 March 1835, 3. An alternative is to omit the page numbers, as is often done in newspaper citations, since articles may migrate from one page to another in different editions of the same paper.
Q. Should footnotes and bibliographic entries for foreign publications be written in the foreign language or in English?
A. Use the original language for the book title. You may transliterate languages that have non-Latin alphabets, and you may also provide an English translation of the title in brackets [Like this: Sentence-capped and roman], if you think it will be helpful to readers. The title itself should appear in English only if it is the title of a published English translation of the work. The place of publication should be given in English, and if you are certain of the correct translation, you may render terms like vol. and ser. in English. Please see CMOS 17.19, 17.66–67, 17.177, 17.101, and 17.108.
Q. I’ve been unable to find any competent freelance editors. Do you offer any editing services?
A. No, I’m sorry—we pretty much have our hands full here with Chicago’s books. You might try the Web site of the Editorial Freelancers Association: http://www.the-efa.org/.
Q. Hello, I’m in desperate need of help with my MA dissertation. The proper abbreviation for the International Security Assistance Force’s Regional Command South is RC(S). How do I put RC(S) into parentheses after the first usage of “Regional Command South” to indicate that I will henceforth be using the abbreviated form? Right now I have “The primary allies of Regional Command South (RC(S)) . . .” This, however, does not seem correct. Can you please help?
A. You’re almost there—Chicago uses square brackets for parentheses within parentheses: (RC[S]). If you don’t like the looks of that, rephrase to avoid the second parenthesis: The International Security Assistance Force’s Regional Command South, abbreviated RC(S), . . .
Q. In a technical proposal, would you say “400-ton-per-day scrubber” or “400-tons-per-day scrubber”? Thanks a bunch!
A. The first construction is the more usual one. (Btw, what is a 400-ton-per-day scrubber, exactly? And where can I get one?)
August Q&A
Q. We are struggling with hyphenating trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific. AP says to hyphenate; Chicago does not (7.90). But you say to hyphenate trans-American. If Atlantic, Pacific, and American are all normally capitalized, shouldn’t they all follow the same hyphenation standard for prefixes?
A. Chicago’s choices follow Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary. If transatlantic and trans-American appear near each other in a manuscript, however, we might hyphenate both for the sake of visual harmony.
Q. I am writing a qualitative thesis in which I quote several primary-source published documents that, if cited under the actual names of the authors, would destroy subject anonymity. How do I create a reference list citation for a document I quote or cite and protect the research subject’s rights to anonymity?
A. You can either use pseudonyms or use “Anonymous” in place of the person’s name. Perhaps in your research you can find other reference lists that show solutions to this problem. It’s usual for a university to have strict guidelines for protecting the subjects of research, so you might also consult your school’s dissertation secretary or your thesis advisor.
Q. Would you hyphenate the phrase “day and a half”?
A. No, unless you are using it to modify a noun (not always the best idea):
It took a day and a half to throw all his stuff onto the lawn.
The day-and-a-half class required hip waders, a claw hammer, and a signed liability release.
Q. I am writing a government report, and the first letters of words in the title are supposed to be capitalized. In such a case, should prepositions be capitalized? The government employee who edited my work said that along should be capitalized, but not of, and this doesn’t make any sense to me.
A. Although Chicago style lowercases all prepositions (but see CMOS 8.167 for exceptions), some style guides uppercase prepositions of five or more letters. Ask your editor for a style guide.
Q. Is it correct to use parenthesis to indicate the possibility of a noun as singular or plural? Example: Child(ren).
A. I wouldn’t. It’s not so much an issue of correctness as of ickiness.
Q. I’m in the process of editing a nonfiction book about a murder trial that took place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1983. I need to know whether courtroom testimony that the author quotes from the public record—and has set inside quotation marks—must be reproduced precisely as it was transcribed in the courtroom (except for elisions and paraphrases of testimony not set in quotes).
A. Yes, if it’s quoted from the public record, it should be reproduced precisely. If the author has reason to think that the transcription is misleading or faulty, she can say so, either by interpolation or by comments outside the quotation.
Q. Must a comma always precede the phrase “such as”? If not, what is the rule for when there should be a comma?
A. You need a comma if what follows is nonrestrictive. Our Q&A has devoted much space to this issue; if you type “restrictive” into the search box, you can access the relevant questions and answers.
Restrictive: I love moments such as those. [I don’t love all moments; this tells which moments I do love.]
Unrestrictive: Don’t you love that lucky, jazzy feeling, such as when you meet someone cute or find money in your pocket? [I love that feeling, unrestricted; here are some examples of it.]
Q. The assistant editor of my local newspaper wrote the following sentence in a column: “My parents had my little brother and I later in life.” I said I believe it should be “my brother and me.” She remains adamant that she is correct and referred me to your book. How is this possible?
A. It’s not possible; she’s flat-out wrong. (And we rarely say that anything is flat-out wrong.) Ask her if she would write “My parents had I.”
Q. In unpublished scholarly works, which are of course double-spaced according to Chicago style, should block quotations be double-spaced also, or should (or can) they be single-spaced?
A. Chicago style for the preparation of a manuscript that will be published is to double-space everything, even notes and block quotations. This style was created in the days when copy editors needed space between the lines to hand mark typos and other corrections. (It’s not true that quotations never need editing, and notes often require heavy editing.) Even now that manuscripts are edited with tracked changes, the author reviewing the editing must have room to respond to queries and make her own corrections.
Q. I’m going to have signs made for the tennis courts at my rather academic club. I want one of them to say something like this:
Tennis Players:
1. Please sign in at front desk.
2. Groom your court after play.
Thank you.
I have lots of questions! Is it fine in an application like this to omit articles to save space? How should I capitalize and punctuate? Is it awkward to have a list like that? I wanted to make it absolutely clear to the reader that he has TWO duties (that is, I don’t want him to stop reading one long sentence and not register his second duty).
A. It’s easy to answer when the writer already has everything down just fine. It’s all fine—really! Sticklers might think that having “your” would mean you have to have “the” to be parallel, but I would argue that “your” isn’t optional and that adding “the” on a sign like this isn’t necessary or even conventional. Maybe you could have another sign pointing that out, just in case.
