Q. In the following sentence, would you stet the comma before “then”? “I’ll just come at the end of May, then.”

A. When then is used as an adverb to mean “in that case,” a comma can be helpful but isn’t strictly required. If you prefer close punctuation (i.e., a liberal use of commas), then you may want to retain such a comma. If you prefer an open style (with fewer commas), you can usually leave it out. (See also CMOS 6.16.) Whatever your style, you should retain a comma whenever then might be misread as “at that time.”

This use of then is analogous to the use of too and either in the sense of also (see CMOS 6.56 and “Commas with ‘Too’ and ‘Either’ ” at CMOS Shop Talk). Some writers always add a comma before that kind of too or either (or two commas in the middle of a sentence); others use a comma only rarely, as when ambiguity threatens (unlikely with too or either) or to add emphasis.

Either approach, consistently and thoughtfully applied, can work well. Alrighty then, on to the next question.

Q. Is it “the angel Gabriel” or “the Angel Gabriel”?

A. Though it’s not exactly a job title, an angel can usually be treated like a writer or a poet relative to capitalization: Just as you would refer to the writer Jane Austen or the poet Maya Angelou (lowercase w and p), you’d refer to the angel (or archangel) Gabriel (lowercase a).

Q. Do typefaces or fonts used in a book or other document need to be credited? CMOS 4.106 makes me think they should, but maybe I misunderstood something.

A. That paragraph in CMOS is about crediting words and images borrowed from other sources and incorporated into your own work. Fonts* are in a different category. Any font licensed for public use that you’ve acquired legally can usually be used without credit.

This includes, for example, the fonts from Google Fonts, which can be downloaded for free and used in your publications or other documents without attribution (like Source Serif 4, the font used for the main text on this page); for details, see the Google Fonts FAQ page.

It also includes fonts acquired from Adobe, some of which are free (including the same Source Serif 4 family) and others of which require a Creative Cloud subscription or other type of purchase (see this page on font licensing from Adobe; there are some restrictions, but none of these involve giving credit to Adobe).

Not that you can’t give credit. Printed books often acknowledge fonts and their designers in a colophon, a brief statement (usually at the end) about details related to the book’s production. The one in CMOS can be found at the end of the printed book (and on the page that follows the entries for the letter z in the index at CMOS Online).

__________

* Traditionally speaking, a name like Garamond or Times refers to a typeface, whereas font refers to an assortment of characters for one of these typefaces in a specific size and style (e.g., italic). These days, the shorter word (font) is commonly used for both typeface and font.

Q. The hyphenation guide at CMOS 7.96 (in sec. 2, under “adjective + noun”) lists “a top-ten school” as containing a compound modifier that needs a hyphen. But would “top ten” always be considered a compound modifier when it appears in front of a noun? For example, in the case of “the top ten schools on the list” (or any construction of “the top ten schools”), would you still recommend hyphenating?

A. That’s a very good question! A top-ten school means a school that is among the top ten schools on a ranked list. In the first expression, top-ten is a compound modifier and is therefore hyphenated; in the second, the phrase top ten simply means first ten, so no hyphen is needed.

Only rarely would the phrase the top ten schools need a hyphen, as when top-ten is being used as a category—a scenario that would be more likely with singular school: Harvard, the top-ten school most commonly selected by students planning to major in political science, is in Cambridge.

Q. I know that there’s a rule that says if two adjectives can be joined by the word and without affecting the meaning, then you should separate the two adjectives with a comma. But sometimes a hyphen seems like the better choice. For example: “a historical-philosophical context” or “military-political involvement.” Do you agree?

A. The hyphens in historical-philosophical and military-political imply a mix of factors that’s more complex than what and would suggest—more of an intersection than a pair of attributes. If that’s what you intend, keep the hyphens rather than replacing them with commas.

These adjectives are equivalent to a term like socioeconomic, in which the word social in social-economic has become the combining form socio- and joins with economic to become one word (some of these terms retain their hyphens; see CMOS 7.96, sec. 2, under “combining forms”).

In fact, the similar term historicophilosophical is entered in Wiktionary and makes an appearance as an example under historico- in Merriam-Webster, so you could consider using that form instead of historical-philosophical (though you could retain the hyphen in this unwieldy compound for the sake of legibility: historico-philosophical).

There’s no established combining form for military, but military-political works well. Or you could try politico-military, as entered in Wiktionary.

Q. If you paraphrase or summarize and it is not a direct quote, do you include the page number in the citation?

A. Yes. In fact, it can be more important to cite page numbers when you paraphrase or summarize than when you quote, especially if the source of the info is longer than a few pages. Words reproduced in a verbatim quotation will almost always be easier to locate in the original than words and ideas approximated by paraphrase or summary.

Q. Hello, I’ve hunted around for an answer to this question and haven’t quite found it. I often cite multiple editions of the same book in my work. My understanding is that footnotes for repeated citations don’t typically list the year, but this would seem to leave ambiguous which edition of the text I’m citing. How should I resolve this to ensure my footnotes are clear? Thanks!

A. If a shortened citation is ambiguous, then don’t hesitate to add info that would make it unambiguous. Assuming the title remains the same for each edition of the book you’re citing, all citations after the first can be in shortened form. For example, if you were citing multiple editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, you might have the following footnotes:

1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855). Except as noted otherwise, this and other editions of Leaves of Grass cited herein are from The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, https://whitmanarchive.org/.

2. Leaves of Grass, 1856 ed.

3. Leaves of Grass, 1881–82 ed.

4. Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.

A shortened note for a book with numbered editions could include the edition number alone or the edition number plus year of publication (after the title or other shortened form): “3rd ed. (1987).”

For the use of italics for the title of The Walt Whitman Archive—which we’re treating as a collected work rather than as a website, though it’s both—see CMOS 14.103. For more on shortened citations, see 13.32–39 and especially 13.37, which includes an example of a title-only citation like the ones in notes 2–4 above.

Q. Should a compound modifier be hyphenated if the noun does not immediately follow? For example, “Hand fabricated in 18-karat yellow gold circa the mid-19th century, the intriguing jewel connects by way of a . . .” “Hand fabricated” is the modifier.

A. When a compound modifier that would normally be hyphenated before a noun that it modifies (hand-fabricated jewel) is separated from that noun by an intervening phrase, keeping the hyphen is usually best. In your example, a hyphen will prevent readers from thinking, however fleetingly, of a hand fabricated in gold (as on a statuette 👋).

Plus, the phrase hand fabricated is closely analogous to handmade and handcrafted, both of which are entered as one word in most dictionaries. It’s also like hand-painted, which is entered as a hyphenated adjective in both Merriam-Webster and the OED. This suggests that hand fabricated, though it’s not in most dictionaries, naturally forms a unit and could benefit from a hyphen no matter where it appears in a sentence.

In other words, you might consider retaining a hyphen for this term even when it follows the noun it modifies—that jewel is hand-fabricated—though Chicago style allows you to omit it there (see CMOS 7.92 and “Compound Modifiers After a Noun: A Postpositive Dilemma,” at CMOS Shop Talk).

In general, be sparing with your hyphens, which can add unnecessary clutter to your prose. But any hyphen added (or retained) for the sake of clarity is usually a good idea.

Q. Do I need a comma before the quoted words in any of the following? (1) She was wearing a T-shirt that said “Girls Rock.” (2) That was team-speak for “Get out of my way!” (3) I came up with “Why would we do that?”

A. Your examples work best as is (without commas). Because they don’t quite count as conventional dialogue (the kind that’s typically found in novels and stories and other works with quoted speech or text), your sentences can incorporate the quotes as if they were simply nouns.

In your first example, the quotation is the object of the verb said; in the second and third, the quotations are the objects of the prepositions for and with, respectively. (You can substitute the word something for each of the quotations to see that commas are unneeded.)

Compare your examples with these: (1) She said, “Girls rock,” which is also what her T-shirt said. (2) The goalie yelled, “Get out of my way!”—though not in so many words. (3) I came up with this: “Why would we do that?” The commas in the first two examples aren’t entirely logical (the quotations still function as objects), but the syntax follows that of conventional dialogue, where commas are normally expected. In the third example, the colon correctly follows an independent clause.

For more details and examples, see CMOS 12.13–17. For the use of the colon in the third example (which would be contrary to Chicago style in your version), see 6.71.

Q. I’ve been unable to find an answer to this tangled web. I have a sentence that ends with a quoted phrase, and the quoted phrase itself ends with a colon. Does the sentence still need a period, and if so, does the period go inside or outside the final quotation mark? Here is the sentence as it was submitted to me: If the inscription or mark is in the same language as the label, insert “Inscription:”.

A. If you can’t change anything in your sentence, then keep the period, after the closing quotation mark, as you’ve done above (see CMOS 7.84 for a similar exception). But if you have the option to reword, try using description instead of punctuation alone: If the inscription or mark is in the same language as the label, insert the word “Inscription” followed by a colon. Readers—not to mention text-to-speech apps—should have no trouble interpreting what that means.

Q. What does CMOS say regarding the use of accents in city names in Spanish? I’m specifically wondering about San José, Costa Rica. Do I keep the accent or get rid of it? What is the general rule?

A. Unless the city has a well-established English-language spelling—like Mexico City for Ciudad de México in Spanish, or Zurich for Zürich in German—retain any accents or other diacritical marks.

Merriam-Webster is a good source for determining whether a city has a common English-language spelling; you can usually use the first-listed spelling for any city entered there. The entry for San José includes the accent, so that’s your answer. (The entry for the city in Silicon Valley—San Jose, without an accent—doesn’t apply here.)

See also CMOS 14.30.

Q. In instances where you have several citations from the same author and year (with lettered years to denote separate sources) within the same in-text citation, would it be acceptable to use an en dash instead of writing out each year? For example: “(Soil Survey Staff 2021a–2021d)” rather than “(Soil Survey Staff 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d).”

A. Yes, that works well. The only caveat is that if your citations will be linked to their corresponding entries in the reference list (as they are in the HTML versions of the articles in the American Journal of Sociology), then you’ll need to list each lettered year to facilitate separate links.

Q. How should specific amendments to laws be cited? For example, if someone wanted to reference just the amended section and not the law in its entirety, how would the 1974 FECA amendments or the 2002 BCRA be cited in contrast to the original 1971 act?

A. According to CMOS 14.183, on laws and statutes,

Federal bills or joint resolutions that have been signed into law—“public laws,” or statutes—are first published separately, as slip laws, and then collected in the annual bound volumes of the United States Statutes at Large (abbreviated in legal style as “Stat.”), where they are referred to as session laws. Later they are incorporated into the United States Code (U.S.C.).

Adapting the suggested citation formats in CMOS, the original 1971 campaign finance law you’re alluding to (enacted in 1972) would be cited as follows (where the slip law is cited ahead of the session law):

Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, Pub. L. No. 92-225, 86 Stat. 3 (1972).

The 1974 amendments would be cited in the same way (regardless of whether you’ve cited the 1971 act), as would the amendments in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002:

Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, Pub. L. No. 93-443, 88 Stat. 1263. 

Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, Pub. L. No. 107-155, 116 Stat. 81.

The 1971 law and subsequent amendments can be cited collectively in the United States Code like this:

Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, as amended, 52 U.S.C. §§ 30101–30146.

In case you’re wondering how we got that info, we used Google to find the relevant documents at US government websites. A search for “FECA 1974” led us to the 1974 amendments at Congress.gov, including a scan of the amendments in the Statutes at Large. That’s where we found the title “Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974” (toward the top of the first page) as well as “Public Law 93-443” (abbreviated in our citation). The form “88 Stat. 1263” can be found there also (“1263” is the first page in vol. 88 of the Statutes at Large). A separate search for “BCRA 2002” likewise brought up the relevant text. We located the 1971 act in title 52 of the current US Code (at House.gov) in a similar manner.

Most of Chicago’s advice for citing legal documents (starting at CMOS 14.170) relies on The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, published by the Harvard Law Review Association. Information not found in CMOS can usually be found there.