Q. My joining your site was prompted by entry 8.40, “Centuries and Decades,” of your 14th edition. Your sample decades were 1800–1809 and 1910–19, and those examples make no sense to me. Decades must have ten years; decades can’t skip years; decades can span neither millennia nor centuries as you have them doing in your examples; e.g., 1800 is the last year of the 18th century, not the first year of the 19th century, and the second decade of the 20th century is 1911–20, not 1910–19. I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot, but isn’t precision an essential ingredient in all writing before style considerations? Also, should writing style be based on popular culture rather than logic? I’m troubled by this entry in your manual and I’d appreciate your letting me know how you justify it.
Q. We are producing our first e-publication. If we were printing the book, the notes would have gone at the end of the publication, but technology is dictating that we divide up the notes and place them at the end of each section. If a work is first cited in the chapter 1 notes and then pops up again in chapter 4, can I use a shortened citation in the chapter 4 notes or must I repeat the information in full?
Q. I’m a production editor working on a novel and can’t figure out the best way to present the epigraph source. The epigraph is “What I am is what I am,” and the author wants the source to be “Lauryn Hill, ‘A Rose Is Still a Rose.’” But in reality, the lyric is from the song “What I Am” by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians; Lauryn Hill sang that line in Aretha Franklin’s song “A Rose Is Still a Rose.” My first instinct is to just credit the epigraph as Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, but the book is urban fiction, and so referencing Lauryn Hill is important for the author. And I don’t want to make it too complicated, since this is a novel and the epigraph should evoke a feeling in the reader, not make them ponder the finer points of music sampling. Any suggestions?
Q. Can you call out a figure from a subsequent section? For example, can you make a first reference to figures 3.9 through 3.12 in section 2.4? My stance is that you can’t make a first-reference callout from the future, only from the current or a previous section. Calling out subsequent sections and appendixes (but not tables and figures) seems somehow different and not subject to this rule, which I might well have unknowingly made up.
Q. For citations, a quoted sentence A is marked with a footnote of no. 8 with a particular author, book, and page number. Sentence B in another paragraph is also quoted from the same author, book, and page number. Can we label it with footnote no. 8 or do we have to cite it with another number?
Q. From a Spanish-speaking company I have many financial documents containing large numbers (billions, trillions). As I understand it, the best practice is either to leave the complete number as is or to round it (1,256,128,023 or 1.3 billion). Is there a rule regarding how many places after the decimal point should be shown? My client wants as much information as possible to be communicated, but it seems to me that, in English, we rarely see anything beyond one place behind the decimal point.
Q. CMOS says that in a short-form title (in an endnote or footnote) the order of words should not be changed. But is it acceptable to change the words in any way while maintaining the basic order? Specifically, for the complete title Address Delivered before the Members of the Suffolk Bar, at Their Anniversary, on the 4th September, 1821, at Boston, could the short form be Address to the Suffolk Bar?
Q. The bibliography I am editing has a few entries where multiple editions of the same book were used as sources. Do I need to create separate citations for each edition, or is there a way to combine them into one? The author currently has written out the citation for the first edition, then listed other editions at the end of the citation.
Q. I am editing an e-book that uses footnotes and endnotes. The author would like to use the footnotes to provide additional information that may be of interest to the reader. As a result, the footnotes are often long and require multiple citations. I’m not sure how to cite multiple sources in a footnote. Should the paraphrased statements be followed by the full citation in parentheses? Should the citations stand alone? The best option, I believe, is to include the material in the text of the book, but the author is greatly opposed to this.
Q. Concerning in-text citations (e.g., Jacobs 1990, 32), CMOS says that when an author’s name appears in the text, it may be omitted in the parenthetical citation (1990, 32), and that when one cites the same item more than once in a paragraph, the author and year of citations after the first may be omitted (32). Suppose a paper makes continued reference to one work throughout an entire section, spanning several pages. May the author and year be omitted throughout after the first citation? Or should they be cited once per page, or once per paragraph, or once per sentence? Or perhaps anytime there is an intervening alternative citation?