UC Press Blog

By Stephanie Summerhays, Senior Production Editor at UC Press

Every seven years or so, editors across the country observe an important but unofficial holiday: the release of a new edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The most recent edition—Chicago 18—published in August last year, and it’s chock-full of new and updated guidance on the writing, editing, making, and publishing of books. 

First, a Word About Style Guides

When you hear the words style guide, you might suddenly see in your mind’s eye a stern, bespectacled editor peering disapprovingly down their nose at comma splices and dangling modifiers. But good editors don’t love language rules purely for the sake of rules, and discretion and restraint are the hallmarks of an editor who knows a style guide for what it is: a tool to serve the book and the reader.

Style guides enable editors to support the best possible reader experience by minimizing distractions born of inconsistency, inelegance, or error. Relying on the expertise and careful thought of other editorial experts (for instance, the team behind Chicago) also helps editors avoid getting bogged down in style and grammar indecision and instead focus on helping the author’s ideas and arguments reach readers with clarity and precision.

How to Work with a Style Guide

As an author, you don’t need to be an expert in your press’s style guide—that’s the editor’s job. But familiarity with certain key elements of your press’s preferred style guide can help you as you’re writing and, in turn, help your editor as they’re editing. Focus your efforts in these areas:

1. Find out what style to follow as early as you can.

Ask your press which style guide(s) they follow. Many American publishers use Chicago but also allow for style guides that might be more tailored to your discipline. If your manuscript includes material that you previously published elsewhere, be sure to update the style of that material (especially the citations) to match the rest of your manuscript.

2. Consult your chosen style guide early and often as you prepare your documentation.

Poorly prepared source citations demand intensive time and care from an editor, who then has less opportunity to focus on your text. Style guides offer guidance for structuring, formatting, and punctuating citations for all types of sources, so you never have to guess what to cite or how to do it. Chicago offers these helpful quick guides for humanities style (notes+bibliography) and author-date style, plus more in-depth coverage in the style guide itself.

3. Be consistent during writing and flexible during editing.

Editors are expert but not arbitrary; they edit to a style guide but also, vitally, to the work you’ve already done in your manuscript. If a specific style choice—such as capitalizing a particular term—is important to you, doing so consistently in your writing is key. When it’s time for editing, being open to your editor’s suggestions (which often originate in carefully thought-out style guide recommendations) can help you consider whether you’re effectively building a bridge to your readers.

Highlights from Chicago 18

Chicago 18’s updates are wide-ranging, covering everything from commas to AI to the NATO phonetic alphabet. A few key themes emerge from a careful review of the new edition:

• An increased focus on supporting accessibility, such as through good alt text and changes in documentation standards
• A new focus on technology-related issues, including the big-picture (e.g., how to use, acknowledge, and/or cite AI-generated content in your work) and the granular (e.g., how to style hashtags and internet slang in narrative text)
• New guidance to reflect sociocultural progress and priorities, such as how to treat cultural-identity terms (e.g., Black, Indigenous, and W/white) and grammatical applications of the now widely accepted singular they pronoun
• Increased deference to common usage, such as (near-)endorsement of comma splices (!!)
• Relaxing or eliminating fine distinctions of style and grammar that readers can sometimes even mistake for errors, especially with commas, capitalization, and hyphenation
• Streamlining recommendations for certain issues of citation, such as new formatting recommendations for internet sources and clarifications on what to include or omit in notes and bibliographies

Authors starting work on their manuscripts can also take note of some specific updates of special interest:

• Acknowledgments should appear in the back of the book, after body text and before the documentation.
• Prepositions of five letters or more (e.g., through, between, around) are now capitalized in titles, headings, and other types of display text.
• An initial The is now capitalized in running text when it forms part of the official name of a periodical (e.g., The New York Times) but may be omitted in source citations.
• Places of publication are no longer recommended for source citations.
• Replacing repeated author names with dashes is no longer recommended in bibliographies and reference lists.

• Short-form citations (that is, where a source has already been cited in the chapter and is being cited again in a shortened format) can now take one of three recommended forms.

   

This post was produced as part of our publishing resource series for our FirstGen Program.

Learn more about the UC Press FirstGen Program