Heading up the copyediting team of CMOS 16 this year has been the high point of my years at the University of Chicago Press. What a great privilege—not to mention a lot of fun. All of us at Chicago think the revisions make this the best edition ever.
Here are a few of our favorite changes from the previous edition.
June 22: Chicago now lowercases the generic use of web: e.g., website, but World Wide Web.
June 29: Possessives of classical proper names ending in an eez sound add apostrophe-s (Xerxes’s armies).
July 1: The hyphenation chart is back!
July 6: Titles of blogs should be set in italics; titles of blog entries should be in quotation marks.
July 8: When a title ends in a question mark, a comma should also appear if the grammar calls for one: Three stories she never mentioned were “Are you a Doctor?,” “The Library of Babel,” and “Diamond as Big as the Ritz.”
July 12: The plural of a quoted word or phrase may be formed without an apostrophe (“To be continueds”).
July 14: The names of photographs, like those of paintings, are italic. (Respect for photographers at last!)
July 19: In author-date citations in reference lists, put article titles in quotation marks and use headline capitalization. With this change, the two systems of Chicago documentation (author-date and notes-bibliography) become easier to learn and use, since the stylings of elements will be the same in both systems. Only the order of the elements varies, as before.
RETIRED RULES
15th: A page may not end with a single line from a new paragraph. 16th: Now it may.
15th: Brand names that begin with a lowercased letter followed by a capital letter may not appear at the beginning of a sentence. 16th: Now they may. iPad is an example.
15th: In headline capping, the second term in a hyphenated compound is lowercased. 16th: Now it's capped (Medium-Sized; Twenty-First).
15th: Parentheses may not appear back to back. 16th: Now they may, if they enclose entirely unrelated material.
15th: A generic term is lowercased when its proper form applies to more than one modifier. 16th: Now it is capped: Illinois and Chicago Rivers.
15th: A chapter subheading may not include a note reference. 16th: Now they may.
