Style guides are utilized throughout creative industries to help create consistency and cohesion. They set the standards for style, grammar, layout, and more. Journalism in the US, for example, relies on the Associated Press (AP) style. Book publishing in the US utilizes the The Chicago Manual of Style.
This style guide began in 1906 from the University of Chicago Press, and it has been continually updated in the years since. The most recent edition is the eighteenth, which was published in 2024. While nothing extensive tends to change between editions, they alter rules as common usage of certain standards shifts. For example, in the seventeenth edition they recommended following Merriam-Webster’s spelling of e-book (with a hyphen) but have now shifted its recommendation to ebook (closed). They have also begun to shift views on correct usages. One such example is the current endorsement of using they as a singular pronoun even in formal contexts, something they don’t recommend in past editions.
Here at Ooligan, I use this guide in every task I undertake to copyedit the materials that pass through the press. When you first enter the online version or pick up the (hefty) physical book, this style guide can seem a bit overwhelming, but it has to cover a lot. They break the information up into three main sections: “Publishing and Editing,” “Style and Usage” (the section I use most), and “Source Citations and Indexes.” From there each section has subsections, and many of those subsections have smaller sections as the information gets broken down. There are fifteen main subsections between all three sections. These designations help for later reference to find information within the guide. One element of CMOS that I refer back to often is their hyphenation guide which details their recommendations for hyphenating compound adjectives and words with prefixes or suffixes. The guide itself is noted as section 7.96. This means it is in subsection seven “Spelling, Distinctive Treatment of Words, and Compounds,” and as the sections are broken down by decimals, you can guess that 7.96 is further down the list.
This style guide, like many, offers information on every tiny detail of writing that an editor is considering when they read through a piece. Is possession of an item being shared by two subjects, or is the sentence actually referring to two separate objects that each subject possesses (Ann and Mark’s house vs. Ann’s and Mark’s houses, as detailed in 7.23). If I am unsure of where I might find something, the online guides search feature is an amazing tool to help get yourself oriented to the proper section. Searching keywords like possessive pronouns, hyphenation, adverbial phrases, and so on can save a lot of time.
For times when you find the right section but perhaps are still a bit unsure after reading the section on how to proceed, there is a “style Q&A” that the website offers. This allows users to look through questions posed to CMOS about their guidelines and get editors’ responses back about how to proceed. These posts can be quite informative and more in-depth than the explanations found in the manual itself. The CMOS Shop Talk blog features a section for some style workouts which are small quizzes that you can use to test their knowledge. I find these helpful to help brush up on a topic, test if I am indeed enforcing something correctly, and to help learn elements of CMOS I may be less familiar with. When the answers are revealed the explanation will link to the section of the guide it is drawing from so you can read and study more.
The Chicago Manual of Style has a lot of information in it and can be a beast to tackle at first glance. But once you get a hang of how things are organized and how to best search within the guide, you can quickly begin finding all the information you need to help bolster your editing skills and ensure you are enforcing proper conventions. Happy editing!
Sources
The University of Chicago Press
The Chicago Manual of Style Online, 18 ed.
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