The following list highlights passages in The Copyeditor's Handbook (CH) that are affected by the new recommendations in the 15th edition of Chicago (C15, published in 2003).

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CH page 67 (description of the Chicago website)

Chicago's website has a new URL (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org). The site includes a full-text search engine for C15. Type in a term or phrase, and the search engine returns a list of the sections of the manual—not the actual text—that contain the term.

CH page 73 (syntactical vs aural punctuators)

On matters of punctuation, C14 emphasized syntax and largely ignored the ear. In contrast, C15 repeatedly mentions the use of the comma to indicate a slight pause (see 6.18, 6.20, 6.27, 6.29, 6.34, 6.35, 6.36, 6.41, 6.45).

CH page 109 (use of the hyphen to attach a prefix to a hyphenated element)

C15 6.85 recommends a hyphen, not an en dash, to avoid "awkward asymmetry": a wheelchair-user-designed environment (not wheelchair-user-designed environment).

CH page 112 (stronger and weaker punctuation marks)

C15 6.123: No period (except an abbreviating period) or comma before or after a question mark or exclamation point. If a question mark and an exclamation point fall in the same spot, select the one most appropriate to the context.

CH page 114 (italic and bold punctuation marks)

C15 demotes the conventions stated in CH to an alternative practice (see 6.5). The new preferred practice (6.3) calls for setting all punctuation marks in the same font as the surrounding text, with some exceptions (see 6.4, 6.6).

CH page 115 (styling of slashed constructions)

C15 6.112 recommends a thin space before and after a slash that appears next to an open compound: World War I / First World War Margaret / Maggie May

CH page 129 (use of italics for foreign words and phrases)

C15 7.54: "If a familiar foreign term . . . occur[s] in the same context as a less familiar one, either both or neither should be italicized. . . .The decision to italicize should not be based solely on whether a term appears in Webster."

C15 7.55: If an unusual foreign term appears repeatedly, "it need be italicized only on its first occurrence."

CH page 134 (plural form for abbreviations and initialisms)

C15 7.16 shows M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s as plural forms, but C15 prefers that academic degrees be styled without periods (MA and PhD), with the plural forms MAs (add an s to an all-uppercase abbreviation) and PhD's (add an apostrophe and an s to an abbreviation that includes both uppercase and lowercase letters); see 15.4 and 15.5.

CH page 134 (plural form for letters of the alphabet)

C15 7.65 advises adding an apostrophe and an s to form the plural of a lowercase letter (two p's), and adding only an s to form the plural of an uppercase letter (the three Rs; she earned three Bs).

CH pages 134-135 (possessive form of common nouns and proper nouns)

C15 7.17-23 give a complex series of recommendations, exceptions, and alternatives for forming the possessive of generic and proper nouns. (These resist easy summary here.)

CH page 137 (possessive form of words in quotation marks)

C15 7.30 advises that a term enclosed in quotation marks "never be made into a possessive"—rewrite instead.

CH page 137 (attributive nouns)

C15 7.27 discourages apostrophe-less attributive nouns (consumers' group, not consumers group) but notes that the attributive is used in some names (Publishers Weekly, Diners Club).

CH page 143 (hyphenation with prefixes)

"Midocean" and "premalignant" do not appear in C15 ("neoorthodox" is on page 307), but the principle remains the same. C15 recommends "co-worker."

CH page 155 (geographical names and nicknames)

C15 8.51 recommends lowercasing terms that are political, rather than geographical, entities: the iron curtain, the third world.

CH page 158 (company names that begin with a lowercase letter)

C15 8.74: When the first word of a sentence is a proper name that begins with a lowercase letter (eBay, iMac), revise the sentence or uppercase the first letter (EBay is . . . ); see also 8.163.

CH pages 161-162 (headline style)

C15 8.167-170 present new conventions and alternatives for headline style.

CH page 199 (set-off quotations)

C15 11.12 recommends setting off quotations that are eight lines or longer.

CH pages 208-210 (ellipsis points)

C15 11.62-65 introduce a third method for handling ellipsis points: the rigorous method.

CH pages 210-211 (brackets within quoted material)

C15 11.71 introduces a new convention for quoted words within a bracketed interpolation: Use double quote marks. Example: "Do you mean that a double-headed calf ["two-headed calf" in an earlier version] has greater value than two normal calves?"

CH page 318 (subheads)

C15 1.73 notes that in some cases it is OK to have only one subhead of a given level (e.g., one A-level subhead) in a section.

CH page 361 (the quotation from C14 on the "revival" of the singular use of they)

C15, chapter 5—written by Bryan Garner—takes a very different approach:

5.204: Garner warns that if one uses they "as a kind of singular pronoun . . . credibility is lost with some readers." Instead, he advises recasting "to eliminate the need for any personal pronoun" (5.43), using it when "the sex is unknown or unimportant {the baby is smiling at its mother}" (5.51) or substituting an article for the personal pronoun (5.78).

But Garner also says that "sometimes an indefinite pronoun carries a plural sense {nobody could describe the music; they hadn't been listening}{everyone understood the risk, but they were lured by promises of big returns}" (5.64).

In other words, Garner disapproves of treating they as "a kind of singular pronoun" but he allows that, on occasion, one may treat nobody or everyone as a plural antecedent.

CH pages 419-420 (copyright infringement)

C15 4.80: "Unfair use will not be excused by paraphrasing."

C15 4.82: "Reproduction of a single graph, table, or chart that simply presents data in a straight-forward relationship, in contrast to reproduction of a graph or chart embellished with pictorial elements, should ordinarily be considered fair use. Indeed, some graphs that merely present facts with little or no expressive input . . . may even be beyond the protection of copyright."

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