December Q&A

Q. In the word-by-word alphabetizing example in CMOS 15.69, why are “New, Zoe” and “News, Networks, and the Arts” before “New Deal” and “news conference,” respectively? Thanks.

A. As explained there, in the text introducing a comparison of the two basic systems of alphabetization—letter by letter and word by word—a comma “interrupts” alphabetizing in both systems. This means that any words that follow a comma are ignored unless what comes before the comma is identical in two or more entries:

New, Arthur [alphabetized under “New”]

New, Zoe [also alphabetized under “New”; “Zoe” follows “Arthur”]

New Deal [alphabetized under “New Deal” (which follows “New”)]

news, lamentable [alphabetized under “news”]

News, Networks, and the Arts [also alphabetized under “News”; “Networks” follows “lamentable”]

news conference [alphabetized under “news conference” (which follows “news”)]

The order of the terms above would be the same in the letter-by-letter system. But in letter-by-letter order, a space between words is ignored. So, for example, “newborn” would come before the phrase “New Deal” in the letter-by-letter system (because “newb” comes before “New D”), whereas the opposite would be true in a list arranged word by word, in which alphabetizing stops after the first word in each entry (the word “New” comes before “newborn”). Note that Chicago now prefers the word-by-word system (as of the 18th edition; see CMOS 15.66).

Q. Why is ibid. preferable to id.? The meaning is essentially the same and id. is more succinct, and it is used extensively in legal citation without any apparent confusion or misunderstanding.

A. What you say is true. But because id. (idem, the same) is used mainly in legal citations whereas ibid. (ibidem, in the same place) has long been preferred in history and most other academic disciplines, ibid. is much more well known than id. Whether ibid. also benefits from not looking like id (the complement to the ego and superego) is anyone’s guess.

For more on ibid. and id. (including Chicago’s preference for shortened citations over either of those abbreviations), start with CMOS 13.38.

Q. When writing technical documentation, some steps may require a warning or information of note with the step. In those instances, the information begins either with “Warning:” or “Note:” (respectively). If the word before the colon is bolded, should the colon also be bolded?

A. In the scenario you describe, the colon belongs to the word it’s next to rather than to the words that follow. If the former is in a bold font—or in italics or a different color—then the colon would be styled to match:

Warning: Don’t press this button.

Note: Some buttons are more important than others.

See CMOS 6.2 and 6.3 for some additional considerations and examples.

Q. Hello! You have a Q&A where a speaker interrupts their own dialogue with an em dash, and your example uses a space before the new sentence: “I thought I might— Oh, it’s no use.” While I understand the logic of the space (the first sentence has ended suddenly; a new one starts), in practice, is there a justification for just closing up the spaces with all such em dashes for expediency and consistency, even if what follows is a complete sentence? Our global manuscript cleanup process would remove that space even if the author had written it in, and I am reluctant to have copyeditors spend time adding the space back in on a case-by-case basis, agonizing over whether the next clause merits a space and a cap (if it’s ambiguous), and so on. Is there room for a house style exception on this, or do you think that the space should be followed as a matter of Chicago style? Thank you for any help!

A. That space after the em dash in “might—” isn’t technically Chicago style; it’s not currently covered in CMOS itself (as of the 18th edition). But as our Q&A implies, we do think the space (followed by an initial capital) is useful—as does Benjamin Dreyer, the author of Dreyer’s English (Random House, 2019; see p. 124).

Still, it’s a small detail that isn’t likely to be missed if it’s not there in the first place. But if you do make an executive decision to clean out spaces after em dashes, consider changing the initial capitals that follow them to lowercase (except in proper nouns or initialisms or the like); absent that space, a capital may look to some readers like a mistake (though maybe less so in styles that put a space before and after a dash):

“I thought I might— Oh, it’s no use.”

becomes

“I thought I might—oh, it’s no use.”

not

“I thought I might—Oh, it’s no use.”

The first example is arguably best; it conveys the self-interruption more definitively than the others do. But if your editing resources are limited, this is one detail that, again, could be left on the cutting-room floor. Just be sure to alert your authors to what you’ve done when you return their copyedited manuscripts for review; they should get a chance to restore any spaces plus initial capitals that they think are mandatory.

Q. Should the indefinite article “a” be used when introducing a professor emeritus? For example, “He is [a] professor emeritus of chemistry at the university.” On the one hand, “a” usually indicates that the person is not the only person with that title at the university. On the other hand, Google Ngram shows a higher preference for no article.

A. We agree that adding “a” could make sense if there’s more than one such professor at the university in question. But whether there’s one or eleven, omitting the article makes “professor emeritus” sound more like a professional title than a job description. That is, it sounds fancier.

This may explain why it would be relatively rare to refer to someone as “teacher of” chemistry or another subject (without “a”), whereas calling someone “professor of”—even without “emeritus”—is fairly common (“She is professor of chemistry at . . .”). The word professor enjoys a status that teacher does not.

In other words, there’s no definitive answer to your question. Though adding an “a” or an “an” can work well before a title held by more than one person, omitting the article before “professor” and variations of that term even when there’s more than one can be an equally good choice, one that follows an unstated convention in academia.

Q. The 18th edition says to include “The” when part of an official periodical title. What about upper- or lowercasing “The” in organizations such as The Juilliard School or The Metropolitan Museum of Art? (I prefer lowercase, but they refer to themselves with “The.”)

A. Chicago’s new guidelines relative to an initial article in names like The New York Times do not extend to the names of organizations. The main reason behind this difference is that the names of organizations aren’t set off from the surrounding text by italics or quotation marks.

The occasional exception can be made on a case-by-case basis—like the exceptions made by Julliard and the Met when writing about themselves (or by the University of Chicago Press in its copyright lines, including at the foot of this page: “© 2024 by The University of Chicago”). But when you refer to organizations other than your own, there’s generally no obligation to capitalize an initial “the.”

Q. How would you cite a website home page in a bibliography? Would the page title be “Home Page” (in quotes) or just a descriptive “Home page” (no quotes)? Or the title of the website? Or something else entirely?

A. A home page is almost never titled “Home Page,” so a description is your best option (though you can leave that out if it’s obvious from the URL and the other information in your citation). Note also that a home page isn’t normally a source that you’d list in a bibliography; consider limiting your citation to a mention in either the text or a note (though we’ll show the form for a bibliography entry here).

Wherever you cite it, you should save a version of the page as it existed when you consulted it. Unlike a published article or other content that may be available from a home page, a home page itself is designed to change over time (i.e., as a site adds content or to keep up with new software, or both).

If it is important to share this version with your readers, use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine or a similar service to create a public link and cite that version as follows:

University of Chicago Press (home page). Archived November 27, 2024. https://​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20241127140410​/https://​press​.uchicago​.edu​/index​.html.

That’s the page at https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html as it existed on November 27 at four minutes and ten seconds after two in the afternoon UTC (the string of numbers in the middle of the URL; that link points to the page as saved using the Wayback Machine’s Save Page Now feature). If you do not cite an archived version, you will need to include an access date. For more details and examples, see CMOS 14.104. For the meaning of UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), see 10.47.