THE ICE PICK

The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th ed. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003. 956 p. $55.00. Includes: bibliography, illustrations, index, and "key terms." ISBN: 0-226-10403-6.

If you have questions on manuscript preparation and editing or are looking for authoritative answers on style and usage, this classic manual is the one most commonly used in general publishing by editors and publishers.

You may be familiar with the Associated Press Stylebook, which is the usual guide for journalists. Differences abound, which is why some authors insist on putting spaces before and after dashes (preferred by AP) and others insist equally strongly that there should be no spaces surrounding dashes (preferred by CMS).

Electronic publishing has created even more confusion, and this completely updated new edition of CMS has substantial sections dealing with manuscript preparation for electronic submissions and publications, as well as a much-needed section on usage and grammar.

It covers not only manuscript preparation for authors and thorough explanations of punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, spelling, author-editor relationships, editorial markings, rights and permissions, authors’ responsibilities, publishers’ responsibilities, and design and production, but also how to handle numbers, quotations, abbreviations, foreign words and phrases, dialogue, page numbering, spacing, glossaries, illustrative material, author’s changes and corrections, and even things like how to estimate the time needed to make revisions on your manuscript and a "sample design and production schedule for a book printed domestically." Yet the gentle humor present in many of the examples cited keeps CMS from being just the very dry manual it could be.

You may find that you wish to handle a certain thing differently from CMS’s recommendation. For example, CMS puts interior dialogue, or thoughts, in quotation marks, but most authors prefer to reserve quotation marks for actual dialogue. And where CMS calls for only one space after a period, most of the editors I’ve talked to prefer you give two spaces for easier readability. CMS allows for an author’s individual stylistic differences, and if you do deviate from their preferred practice, at least you will know where you have done something that may go against their rule, and be ready to justify your choice.

There are some things about this edition I don’t like as well as I did in the previous one. Lacking, are the very straightforward typing instructions like, "Chapter openings should begin at least three inches from the top of the page." And you must be very careful with advice such as, "don’t worry if, in the hard copy, [hard] hyphens happen to fall at the end of a line." Yes, but later on it says, "End-of-line hyphens should be marked to distinguish between soft and hard hyphens. Soft hyphens are used merely to break a word at the end of a line; hard hyphens are ‘permanent’ hyphens (such as that in twenty-first) and must remain no matter where the hyphenated word or term appears." So they are distinguishing between manuscripts submitted electronically and those submitted on paper, but not saying so very clearly. This going back and forth is tiresome to say the least, and I think it is a result of their dropping the chapter on "The Author’s Manuscript" and trying to blend it with the one on "The Author’s Responsibilities, all of which makes the book much harder for authors, especially beginners, to use. It also requires that you be more aware of the context of their rule and the contents of the manual, and that you think more about the rule you are reading and not just try to apply it blindly. If you already have a copy of the 14th edition, I recommend hanging onto it, for a while at least, to help fill in the gaps left by CMS’s leap into the future.

Many other writing reference works are now available online, but CMS, unfortunately, is not. You still have to buy it or use it in your local library. The price is annoyingly high in my opinion, although the online bookstores have it for less, or you may be able to pick up a used copy.

Things are changing so fast that what publishers wanted and expected in authors’ manuscripts and the rules many of us faithfully followed when we started writing our books, are out of date. So, regardless of price and certain drawbacks, I have come to believe that this is an essential reference book for all serious fiction authors.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Sept. 2006.}