Chicago Manual of Style: A Summary

chillibreeze writer — Anju Kotwani

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Ever wondered what a writing style guide is and why we need one. This question led me to probe further. My research revealed some significant facts about various style guides and their importance.

Style Guide: Meaning
Put simply, a style guide is a set of rules defining editorial conventions to be followed while publishing a book or research paper. A style guide can be called a writer’s Bible that includes the basic guidelines for matters such as punctuation, capitalization, and rules for citing references.

Style guides were basically designed with the intention of bringing uniformity in writing and documentation. A style guide may be used for general writing as well as specialized writing catering to a particular audience.

There are many style guides including Chicago Manual of Style, APA style, MLA style, and Turabian Style. In this article the research is narrowed down to Chicago Manual of Style. So here’s the low down on the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS).

History of Chicago Manual of Style
The CMS was the brainchild of a group of proofreaders working in the Chicago University Press. During 1890, there were a lot of inconsistencies pertaining to style in the handwritten manuscripts that were prepared by the faculty of the University of Chicago and so the need for a common style was felt. The year 1891 saw the advent of the Chicago manual style sheet.

Since then, the CMS is used by researchers and the students alike for writing term papers, theses, dissertations, and journal articles across various academic disciplines.

The CMS includes guidelines for manuscript preparation, art submission, proofreading, grammar usage, documentation, and most importantly, citation styles.

Turabian style and CMS
Many researchers concur that the CMS closely resembles the Turabian Style. Turabian style, also known as A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, is an offshoot of CMS and is named after Kate L. Turabian, who published her work on this style while working in University of Chicago. The Turabian style can be called a super specialization of CMS and it covers the standards and manuals for student papers, theses, and dissertations in detail.

Citation in CMS
Wikipedia defines a citation as “a single bibliographic entry which normally provides all the information needed for a researcher to locate the book or article to which it refers.”

Most of the style guides use a single citation system. The CMS has incorporated two citation systems: the humanities style and the author-date style. The humanities style presents bibliographic information in notes. The author-date style is used for brief citation in the text usually in parentheses, by author’s last name and date of publication. Scholars in the area of physical, natural, and social sciences use this style.

To better understand humanities and author-date citation styles, here are some practical examples of both:

To cite a reference in humanities style we need a note (N:) that includes the name of the author, title of the book, (place: publishing house, year), page number; followed by a bibliographic entry (B) that includes Name of the author (last name, first name). The title of the book. Place: Publishing house, Year.

To cite a source in the author-date style we need Text Citation (T) that includes (the author’s last name date, page number) followed by a reference list entry (R) that includes Last name, First name, Year. The title. Place and Publishing house.

We can understand the citation styles with the help of an example, where “Chicago Manual Style: A Summary” is the title of the book, “Chillibreeze” is the publisher, 2010 is the year and 1 is the page number.

N: 1. Anju Kotwani, Chicago Manual of Style: A Summary (India: Chillibreeze, 2010), 1

B: Kotwani, Anju. Chicago Manual of Style: A Summary. India: Chillibreeze, 2010.

T: (Kotwani 2010, 1)

R: Kotwani, Anju. 2010. Chicago Manual of Style: A Summary. India: Chillibreeze.

Citation for E-books
If you are citing an E-book or Electronic Book, the URL can be added at the end of the citation in Notes (N), Bibliographic entry (B) and Reference list entry (R).

Chicago Manual of Style: A Continuous journey
Since the time it was first published, CMS has been revised many a times to keep up with the changing needs of the writers and changing trends and technologies such as the emerging trend of Internet. Till date, 15 editions of CMS have been published. If the figures are to be believed, in the United States, most non-journalism writing follows the CMS.

Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in April, 2010. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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