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.