Q. Hi, I copyedited a short volume in August, and my brief was British English for spelling and no serial commas, so I changed “color” to “colour” and removed the Oxford commas. In September, I was asked to proofread the PDF, and I noticed that someone else had, in the meantime, changed the spelling back to American, but left out the serial commas. So I did not add them back in. The volume was going to print in two hours and this was a last-minute, rush, unscheduled proofread. Now I’m being asked why I didn’t flag all the spots where a serial comma would go so that they could be put in. My answer was because it would have created unnecessary work for the typesetter at the eleventh hour and it appeared to have been an editorial choice to leave them out. I also told them that Chicago style (which was my choice; I was given carte blanche) permits this kind of flexibility. My interlocutor said that was impossible, I was making it up, and that the serial comma is obligatory, even in a case like this. Who is right?
A. Unless the document was part of a stylistically consistent series that always features Oxford commas, in which case we might side with your interlocutor (we’re guessing from the waffling over spelling depicted in your question that it was not), what you did seems defensible. After all, Oxford (or serial) commas are more of a preference than a necessity:
- Chicago has recommended the serial comma since the very first edition of the Manual, but its use reflects a centuries-old English-language convention that predates and doesn’t depend on Chicago style (see “Oxford, Chicago, and the Serial Comma” at CMOS Shop Talk for a brief history). Whether to write “a, b, and c” or “a, b and c” has nothing to do with how commas have been used elsewhere in the document (except in other series).
- Though many writers and editors value it as a mark of precision, the serial comma is more of an editorial refinement than something that determines meaning (except in rare cases where it removes ambiguity and would be required even in styles that normally omit it). Readers don’t usually question the lack of serial commas in news articles that follow AP style. Their routine absence in French, Spanish, and German—as in français, espagnol et allemand; francés, español y alemán; and Französisch, Spanisch und Deutsch (no comma before et, y, or und)—seems equally unproblematic.
So, as much as we love serial commas, your decision not to mark them for addition at the very last minute (when many publishers would allow only the correction of outright errors) seems reasonable to us. And yes, Chicago style does permit this kind of flexibility, as these words from the preface to the first edition of the Manual (now repeated as an epigraph to the preface in the eighteenth) remind us:
Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.
Q. Hello! My student wrote the following piece of dialogue in their essay: “1-2-3 Go!” Other than spelling out the numerals, what is the correct way to style this according to the Chicago guidelines? Should commas be used instead of hyphens, or should ellipses be used?
A. In Chicago style, the numbers zero through one hundred are usually spelled out (or, using an alternative system, zero through nine). Items in a series are usually separated with commas; in your example, the series itself acts like an introductory phrase, which would be set off from the rest of the sentence by another comma (before go):
“One, two, three, go!”
If you want to emphasize the verb, here are some variations to try:
“One, two, three, go!” (italics for go!)
“One, two, three—go!” (dash instead of comma)
“One, two, three . . . go!” (ellipsis instead of comma; italics for go!)
“One, two, three . . . Go!” (ellipsis; italics and initial capital for Go!)
If you want to draw out the count, add some more ellipses:
“One . . . two . . . three . . . Go!”
Note that numerals are sometimes appropriate in dialogue, but they are usually reserved for expressions that are always written with digits, like the room number in the following example (see CMOS 12.51):
“We were assigned to room 9, on the first floor.”
That’s not to say that “1-2-3 Go!” (your student’s version) doesn’t work. The hyphenated digits suggest counting in a way that’s similar to how words are spelled out in dialogue: “Cat is spelled c-a-t” (see CMOS 6.81). And the numerals help to distinguish the count from the verb without intervening punctuation. The capital G in “Go” is also effective (it’s clearly for emphasis).
In other words, your student has made some departures from the rules that could work just fine in a creative context. Even if you stick more closely to Chicago style, you have options.
Q. When “plus” is used to connect nouns, do the nouns require a plural verb or singular? I’m not sure whether “plus” functions as a preposition or a conjunction in this case. For example: “The last consonant plus the suffix form(s) a separate syllable.”
A. Well, the expression “one plus one equals two” is far more common in published works than “one plus one equal two,” which suggests that plus in such constructions is a preposition. Accordingly:
The last consonant plus the suffix forms a separate syllable.
That sounds fine to us; if it doesn’t sound right to you, try rephrasing:
The last consonant forms a separate syllable with the suffix.
Rephrasing might be especially helpful when the second noun is plural, in which case a singular verb is likely to sound a bit off:
The last consonant plus the three letters that follow it forms a separate syllable.
or, less awkwardly,
The last consonant forms a separate syllable with the three letters that follow it.
Or you could try using and instead of plus, in which case the verb would clearly need to be plural:
The last consonant and the three letters that follow it form a separate syllable.
See also CMOS 5.147 (on misleading connectives).
Q. I’m not sure where to place the spelled-out text for an acronym or initialism. In this first example, it seems to interrupt the flow of the sentence and creates an awkward ending with one word and then a period: “They embark on a true storytelling workshop run by the TMI (Too Much Information) Project.” However, placing the parenthetical phrase at the end of the sentence seems incorrect, since the initialism isn’t TMIP: “They embark on a true storytelling workshop run by the TMI Project (Too Much Information).” How would you advise proceeding?
A. If you’re bothered by the parenthetical interruption in your first version—though it’s the most efficient way to define the term—then try adding more than a simple gloss. For example:
They embark on a true storytelling workshop run by the TMI Project (TMI stands for “too much information”).
Or, if you think spelling out TMI would be TMI for your readers, you could do something like this:
They embark on a true storytelling workshop run by the TMI Project (a name that borrows the textspeak abbreviation for oversharing).
Note that initial caps for “too much information” seem appropriate in “TMI (Too Much Information) Project,” where the term spells out part of a proper name; in our first example above, where “TMI” is defined apart from the name, we used lowercase instead. See also CMOS 10.7.
Q. In my résumé, I note one of the areas of focus as being “post-Communist corruption.” Should the “C” in “Communist” be capitalized?
A. You can write “postcommunist” (lowercase c) if the word communist is referring to the economic system but “post-Communist” (capital C) if it refers to a political party with that word in its name (or to more than one such party). For example, if you’re referring to the period following the demise of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, then a capital C would be appropriate. See also CMOS 8.67.
Note that “postcommunist” (without a hyphen) and “post-Communist” (with a hyphen) follow Chicago style for words formed with the prefix post- (see our hyphenation guide, sec. 4); “postcommunist” also matches the entry for that term in Merriam-Webster. But “post-communist” (with a hyphen) is arguably easier to read and wouldn’t be wrong in a résumé if that’s what you prefer. (In longer documents, consistency with other prefixed terms becomes more of a factor.) See also “Prefixes: A Nonissue, or a Non-Issue?” at CMOS Shop Talk.
Q. I have an author who in the bibliography is rendering Juan de Dios Hernández García as Hernández García, J.d.D. I’ve never seen this before. Is it an accepted option for Spanish names?
A. It seems to be, though usage varies. First, it should be noted that in Chicago style, names aren’t normally abbreviated in bibliographies, so we’d write “Hernández García, Juan de Dios” (as the first-listed or only author; otherwise, the name would be given in normal order).
But if you’re required to use abbreviations, you can either use the one you’ve shown or further abbreviate in a way that ignores the particle de, as in “Hernández García, J. D.”
For an article that shows the latter usage, see Alejandro Quevedo et al., “Isla del Fraile: Reconstructing Coastal Dynamics in Southeastern Spain Through Underwater Archaeological Survey,” Archaeological Prospection 31, no. 2 (2024): 149–70, https://
For an article that shows a name styled like the one in your question, see G. Schmidt-Stohn et al., “The Big Brown Telamonia Unlocked: Four New Species in Cortinarius Section Bovini (Agaricales, Basidiomycota) and a Revised Taxonomy of Bovinoid Cortinarii,” Persoonia 55, no. 1 (2025): 1–58, https://
For yet another example, see Anja M. Deiser et al., “A Role for Nucleosome Remodellers During Resection of Deprotected Telomeres in Yeast,” PLOS One 21, no. 7 (2026): e0352656, https://
If in doubt about which styling to use, ask your publisher. For some additional considerations, see CMOS 15.92 (on indexing Spanish names, advice that also applies to names that are inverted in a bibliography or reference list).