Q. Is there a proper format for creating an e-mail?
A. Not usually. But if you’re writing formal correspondence and want some guidance, try The Gregg Reference Manual, a good resource for business usage.
Q. Which is currently accepted: Web site, web site, website, or Website?
Q. I get so tired of reading about writers using their “spell-checkers” on their
computers. Surely they mean “spelling-checkers” don’t they?
I’ve always thought that only wizards use “spell-checkers”—what
do you think? I love CMOS—read it all the time—I start browsing and I can’t stop!
Thanks again for a great resource!
A. I would guess that the menus in word-processing programs and their need for brevity in order to ensure that an intelligible
portion of a phrase can be displayed are probably partly to blame for the ubiquitous phrases “spell
checker” and “spell check.” Microsoft Word’s
help menu (for version 9/2000), for example, lists the following:
Ways to check spelling
Customize spell checking
Troubleshoot spell checking
Check spelling
But to their credit, once you select either of the middle two, the actual documentation has an expanded title, as follows:
Customize spelling and grammar checking
Troubleshoot spelling and grammar checking
So it appears that someone at Microsoft at least partly agrees with you, expanding “spell”
to “spelling” when there’s ample room.
WordPerfect (version 9) lists “Spell Checker” in its Tools menu. But to their
credit, in their documentation they seem only to use the phrase when referring specifically to a menu item (and exact nomenclature
is important in such settings) or to the title of a small dialog box.
Older versions of WordPerfect, such as WordPerfect 5.1, used “spell” as a verb
meaning roughly “to check the spelling in a document.”
Beyond any of those theories of how people have been influenced to say something as ungrammatical as “spell
check,” I wouldn’t know where to begin. But if you ask me how to spell check,
I can tell you: c-h-e-c-k.
Q. I could not find the term “dot-com” addressed, and I need to know how to capitalize
it and punctuate it. I have seen both dot.com, and dot-com. Which is correct? In capitalizing titles, is it Dot.com or Dot.Com
(in title headings, etc.)?
A. We write “dot-com”: dot-com fantasies. We do not write “dot.com”—that would read “dot
dot com.” In titles, capitalize the d and the c: “Mogul’s Dot-Com Dreams Leak Like RAM from a Cheap Chip.”
Q. We are debating in our office how to refer to our website when the URL appears at the beginning of the sentence. Would we capitalize the first letter (i.e., Www.abcd.com [address changed for this forum]) or not (i.e., www.abcd.com)? Are there any conventions around dropping the “www” (i.e., abcd.com)? If so, would we capitalize the first letter (i.e., Abcd.com)? What about all caps (i.e., ABCD.COM or WWW.ABCD.COM)?
A. We’d never write “Www”; instead, we’d rewrite. And if you’re referring to a website in running text, it’s sometimes okay to drop the “www” and capitalize the rest in a logical manner. For example, you can write about Apple.com or NYTimes.com. For more information and examples, see CMOS 14.244.
Q. I work for a Québec government department and we are trying to make our English websites consistent.
Capitalization is a real problem. We had thought we should treat choices on menus like side heads and capitalize only the
first word, but browsing through the Net, we find a lot of sites that capitalize all the important words in the menu choices
in their sidebars. Do you have any advice on this point? The University of Chicago Press does NOT capitalize its menu (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ ). Is that my answer?
A. Sentence-style capitalization is most often the appropriate choice, but make sure that the choice is a logical one. Note
that we employ headline-style capitalization for the style categories listed in our frame-based menu on this Q&A site. We
do so because each choice in that part of the menu corresponds exactly to the heading for the related document (in fact, these
headings, wherever they appear, are generated from a single entry in a database).
Q. We’re trying to find a definitive style for representing file names, commands, and computer buttons
(e.g., click “exit”) in text. For file names, for example, I’ve
found quotation marks, italics, all caps, boldface . . . you name it, including
no differentiation at all. How would you suggest treating a file name in a sentence such as “Open the
readme.rtf file before continuing with the installation”? What about commands in a sentence such as
“Click on File and select Open”?
A. For commands, icons, keys, etc., an important consideration is to match the capitalization of the software or hardware being
invoked. Fortunately such items tend to be capitalized, which helps to set terms off from the run of text without introducing
italics or other distinctions:
Choose Save As, under File (or press F12), before you make another move.
You can assign shortcuts to a Ctrl+Alt key combination to launch most Windows applications.
File names may be set in italics or in a different font. An elegant alternative is to relegate them to parentheses:
Open the third chapter (John Doe and the problem of anonymity.wpd) and run the cleanup macro (clean_me).
Words to be typed can be set in bold or in a different font, or both, like this:
Type vacation stop at the prompt, then hit Enter.
Quotation marks, unless they are an explicit element of a command or label, should be avoided—though
they may be helpful, used consistently, to delimit file names (which may or may not have telltale extensions and even if they
do may be impossible to distinguish from the run of text, as in the WPD example above). Consistency is the key—set
up a style sheet tailored to your needs (e.g., a software manual would generally merit greater use of bold and italics to
distinguish commands from labels and file names), and stick with it.
Q. My question is, is there any standard for the usage of emoticons? In particular, is there an accepted practice for the use
of emoticons that include an opening or closing parenthesis as the final token within a set of parentheses? Should I (1) incorporate
the emoticon into the closing of the parentheses (giving a dual purpose to the closing parenthesis, such as in this case.
:-) (2) simply leave the emoticon up against the closing parenthesis, ignoring the bizarre visual effect of the doubled closing
parenthesis (as I am doing here, producing a doubled-chin effect :-)) (3) put a space or two between the emoticon and the
closing parenthesis (like this: :-) ) (4) or avoid the situation by using a different emoticon (Some emoticons are similar.
:-D), placing the emoticon elsewhere, or doing without it (i.e., reword to avoid awkwardness)?
A. Until academic standards decline enough to accommodate the use of emoticons, I’m afraid CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you’ve
posed in this note give us added incentive to keep our distance. (But I kind of like that double-chin effect.)
Q. According to CMOS 7.73, computer menu items are capitalized. The editors I work with insist that a menu item from a specific website (such as
yours) should also be placed in quotation marks. Here’s an example: Click on “About
the Manual” to learn about changes made to the recent edition. I think the quotation marks are unnecessary.
What do you think?
A. I think they’re fine, especially when the item consists of several words. Otherwise it could be confusing,
especially if the sentence contains words that must be capped but that aren’t part of a menu item name.
In a given document, if all menu items are single words or familiar phrases (such as Page Down), then caps are enough. If
some items require quotation marks, however, then all should have them.
Q. The CMOS standard is to paginate front matter with lowercase roman numerals, and then use arabic numerals in the text and back matter. This causes a problem when I publish an electronic book in PDF format. PDF numbers the book sequentially, ignoring the different numbering of the front matter. Reading between the lines in CMOS 16, I have come to believe that numbering the front matter separately is a historical artifact. When the text was written first, followed by the front and back matter, and all were done mechanically, one could not number everything sequentially from the title page. In these electronic times, though, sequential numbering takes seconds, literally. Why then use a separate numbering scheme for front matter?
A. This “historical artifact” is still useful in printed books. Chicago books use roman numerals for front matter because it’s still common for pages to be inserted or deleted after the book is typeset (a dedication page is suddenly needed; a promised preface doesn’t arrive), and having to repaginate the entire book is expensive. In addition, a change in pagination in late production could cause inaccuracies in the index. In PDF, repaginating is a snap, but if there is a back-of-the-book index, reindexing may or may not be easy, depending on how the index was compiled.