Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition

I got my new copy of the Chicago Manual of Style yesterday. After working with my copy of CMOS 16 for seven years and studying with it for two certification exams, my old copy has highlighting, pencilling, and sticky tags—also a few folds and wrinkles, and a faint tea stain across the bottom. The updated book promises to provide better guidance for things like gender-neutral language and citing electronic sources. And although it’s daunting to have to re-read so much material, it’s extremely helpful that the breakdown into chapters is the same in this edition.

Resources

• From the publisher: a detailed list of what’s changed: What’s New in the 17th Edition
• American Copy Editors Society interview with Carol Fisher Saller of Chicago University Press about the new edition.

Erasable pens for proofreading

I’ve started proofreading with Pilot Frixion erasable pens recently. Unlike the messy erasable pens of the eighties, these ones work like a dream, without spreading eraser rubbings or wearing out the paper. These pens work with heat: as you rub the plastic knob on the back of the pen over the ink, it produces heat that makes the ink transparent.

I particularly like the red pen for proofreading on paper. I prefer pen over pencil for proofreading because it shows up better and is clear and sharp for making small marks. The problem has always been trying to keep things tidy when I can’t erase my marks. I was very fond of the Bic Wite-Out correction tape for covering up mistakes, but erasing them is far better.

So far I’ve tried the blue 0.7 mm Frixion Ball and the red 0.5 mm Frixion Point, and I like them both. The colour of the ink is nice, and they use a gel ink that isn’t greasy and doesn’t run or smudge. I don’t know whether anyone has had a problem with the ink fading under hot conditions (like a car dashboard in the sun), or whether the erased marks can be made to show again, but I haven’t noticed any problems with durability.

Edit: So it turns out that if you leave a freshly microwaved cup of tea sitting on your notebook, you can in fact erase your ink wholesale. This is a little disconcerting—what if someone puts my proofed manuscript down on a radiator and bleaches out two hundred pages’ worth of edits? The thought gives me the willies. A quick experiment with the freezer suggests that recently erased marks become visible again when exposed to cold, which is pretty worrying too: what if a cold trip on a FedEx airplane makes all of my erased marks visible again?

Google searches as a quick and dirty way to answer style questions

Google’s full-text search provides not only a highly efficient way to find information, it’s also a very easy way to search through a giant corpus of writing. Some people use Google as a spell-checker: just try both spellings of the word and let the number of results decide. The problem with this approach is that you don’t always want to use the spelling or usage that appears most often—after all, the web is not known for being the home of the most careful and polished writing. You’ll get more useful results by narrowing your search to a specific part of the web.

Limit your search to one specific domain

Certain magazines, like the New York Times and the Economist are often used as style standards. When I run into an expression that I’m not sure is standard, or a capitalization or hyphenation question that doesn’t quite match any rules in the style I’m using, I’ll often search the New York Times or Economist websites to see how they handle it.

To get results from a specific site, use “site:” and then the name of the domain, followed by a space and then your search term. For example:

site:nytimes.com "raise his game"

If you forget this syntax (“site:”), you can get the same search by clicking on “advanced search” from the main Google site, and then entering the site under “Search within a site or domain.”

How to use Google Scholar to help you with scientific and academic writing and editing

Google Scholar is extremely useful for editing scientific and academic documents because you can limit your search not only within the academic literature, but within a particular area like biology, chemistry, physics, or medicine.

Let’s say you’re editing a chemistry paper and you come across an unfamiliar use of the term “headspace.” If you just do a regular Google search for headspace, you’ll get references to meditation. Not helpful.

Instead, try the search in Google Scholar and get much more relevant results. You can even search within a specific journal (click “Advanced Search” in the options menu at left.

If you’re writing, you can check your phrasing this way. Maybe it’s late at night, you’re getting tired, and you’re not sure whether to say that the samples were “relatively dilute” or “relatively diluted.” If you plug each phrase into Google Scholar (put quotation marks around them so that you’re searching for that exact phrase, not the two words separately), you’ll see that “relatively dilute” clearly had more hits than “relatively diluted.” That gives you a quick answer to go on with.

A quick fix for the all-caps eyesore

Source: an unknown internet hero

If some keyboarder of the old, old school sends you a message in all caps that you have to read even though the SHOUTING is giving you a headache, there’s a quick fix. Copy and paste the text into a Word document and use the “change case” feature to convert it to upper and lower case. Select all the text (Command-A on a Mac), go to Format -> Change Case . . .  and choose Sentence case. The capitalization won’t be perfect, but trust me, it will be a huge improvement. LibreOffice will also do this for you: click on Format -> Text.

Bonus tip

If you need to use this feature often (I sometimes edit manuscripts where all of the headings are in all caps), Shift-F3 (or Function-Shift-F3) toggles through the casing modes.

How to make typographers’ quotes in HTML

What are typographers’ quotes?

You’ve probably noticed two kinds of quotation marks in web pages and printed matter. The quotation mark that you get when you just press the " key on your keyboard is the straight quote, and it looks like ' and ". Typographers’ quotes, also known as a smart quotes or curly quotes, look like ‘ ’ and “ ”. You’ll notice that opening and closing marks are drawn differently, and you may also notice that they look a lot nicer.

Using typographers’ quotes on a web page

Straight quotes are convenient for two reasons: they’re easy to type, obviously, but more importantly, they’re part of the basic ASCII character set, and therefore when you use them in HTML they will be rendered correctly on everyone’s browser, all the time, even if you completely ignore the concept of character encoding in your document.

If you use typographers’ quotes without specifying the right character encoding for your HTML file, some of your viewers are going to see question marks, boxes, or other crazy symbols instead of the beautiful curly quotes you intended them to see. That’s bad. That can happen if you do something like type up some text in MS Word with the AutoFormat “Replace straight quotation marks with smart quotation marks” feature turned on, and then you cut and paste that text into an HTML file.

Using HTML codes to make smart quotes

The good news is that you can use HTML codes to render your typographers’ quotes, and browsers will know how to render them, even without setting the document encoding. Although these codes are cumbersome in your text, if you’re saving your HTML documents as text files, this is the way to go.

HTML codes for typographers’ quotes

• left single quote ‘ ‘
• right single quote (and apostrophe) ’ ’
• left double quote “ “
• right double quote ” ”

Other special characters

But don’t stop there. You can have other special characters: em-dashes (—), en-dashes (–), non-breaking spaces ( ), and accents. Here’s a list of special characters with their HTML codes.

More information about using special characters on the web

• For more information about character sets, read Joel Spolsky’s article about Unicode and character sets.
• This is a simple test file that you can look at with different browsers.

Wildcards in MS Word

If you use the Word find and replace feature, it won’t take long before you start to wish for a more powerful way of searching. Using wildcards allows you to do much more flexible and powerful searches, but you need to know the syntax.

For example, I was just editing a manuscript where I wanted to remove the leading zeros from dates and times, such as “September 02, 02:30 p.m.” I began by doing a search for

0[1-9]

meaning a zero followed by a digit from 1 to 9. To do an automated replace, I changed the search string to

0([1-9])

and put

\1

in the replace field, to indicate that I wanted to replace the search string with the first section of the search string in parentheses. This worked on the first date, but then mistakenly found the zeros in “9:03” and “105.” So I added a test to make sure that my zero is not (indicated by “!”) preceded by a colon or a digit. I also put the text before and after the zero in parentheses so that I could replace the search string with everything except the zero. The final search string:

([!:0-9])0([1-9])

And the final replace string:

\1\2

Track changes and find and replace

Find and replace doesn’t behave correctly sometimes when track changes is on. (Some of the characters in the replace string end up in the wrong order.) If I am tracking changes, I will turn off the feature while I do the find and replace, and put a comment on the first piece of changed text explaining what I changed and that it has been done throughout the document.

Some references

• Finding and replacing characters using wildcards
• An excellent writeup from the Subversive Copy Editor Blog on how to use search and replace: “Spacing Out with Color: Talking Tech with Russell Harper”
• Another nice tutorial on advanced Word search and replace by Tibor Környei at Translators’ Tools.
• “Fun with find & replace: trailing punctuation” from James Harbeck at Sesquiotica: using dummy characters to bold or italicize quotation marks that come after bold or italic text.

Technology for job seekers, part 2: Email for business communication

In “Technology for job seekers, part 1,” I talked about how to send out a nice-looking resumé in digital form. This time I’d like to share a few techniques for saving yourself from silly email mistakes in business communication.

Good email practice for really important messages

For truly important messages such as job applications and mass mail-outs, don’t compose the message in the email client itself. The habit of hitting “send” as soon as you finish typing but before you check for errors and omissions is too ingrained. Instead, write the message in a text editor or word processor, spell-check it, proofread it (if it’s a really important message, print it out and proofread it on paper, and get someone else to read it too), and then copy and paste it into the email client. In fact, if you’re really serious about getting it right, use a checklist to make sure that the email contains the right information, is addressed to all the appropriate people, and has all the necessary attachments.

Moderately important emails

For messages that aren’t of the highest importance—for instance, messages to business associates who will forgive the odd typo but whom you generally want to impress—you might have a lower level of email vigilance. Here’s what I usually do:

1. Leave the address field blank. An addressed email is like a gun with a bullet in the chamber: one little slip and it’ll go off, whether you’re ready or not.
2. Attach the attachments first, or as soon as you see yourself writing the words “I am attaching.”
3. Write the body of the message as usual.
4. When you hit “send” and find that the message won’t go because there’s nothing in the address field, use this as your reminder to check the message for errors before you fill in the address and send for real.

A useful Gmail feature: undo send

One time, using a work email account, I accidentally sent a personal email to the entire Columbia Forest District. I galloped down the hall to the system administrator’s office. “Is there any way to get an email back?!” Well, lucky me: our internal ministry messaging system wasn’t true email, so I was able to recall my messages. But with true email sent through the internet, you can’t get it back.

What Gmail does is to quietly delay sending your message and offer you the chance to cancel sending by clicking “Undo.” You may have noticed that 99 percent of the times you send something that shouldn’t be sent, you realize it within seconds (part of the reason it’s so infuriating). If you undo, the message appears back in its editing textbox, and you can edit it or throw it away. You can set the send delay from five to thirty seconds in the settings.

Technology for job seekers, part 1: How to send your resumé

I realized during a recent resumé-writing workshop I attended that there are a few simple things that you can do with the tools you’re probably already using to make applying for jobs through email run more smoothly.

In part 1, I’ll talk about why you shouldn’t send your resumé out as a Word document and how to produce a PDF instead. In part 2, I’ll talk about a few nice features in Gmail that can make your business communication go more smoothly.

Send your resumé as a PDF

Send your resumé in PDF form, not as a Word document. Word documents are the wrong format to use for a document that 1) has to be easily accessible to as many people as possible 2) has to look good and 3) should be read-only (not editable).

First, if you send someone a Word document, you’re expecting them to have MS Word installed, and that’s not a good assumption to make. Furthermore, assuming that they do have Word and they fire it up and open your resumé, they’re going to see it in editable form, possibly laid out in draft view, possibly rendering your fonts incorrectly, and perhaps even with squiggly underlines showing all the places where the spelling and grammar checker disagrees with your carefully thought out and well-founded stylistic choices. Or possibly even pointing out a real mistake, god forbid that there should be one. In any case, this is not the first impression you want to make. Finally, the recipient now has the option of printing out your carefully formatted resumé in a way that makes it (and therefore you) look terrible.

So what should you do instead? Save your document as a PDF. PDF, if you’re not familiar with it, is a format created by Adobe. It’s viewable with Adobe Reader, which is free and easily downloadable. Just about anybody who solicits a resumé in digital format from you will be able to view a PDF. When the recipient opens the PDF, it will look exactly the way it did when you created it: same fonts, same font size, same layout. When they print it, it will come out looking good.

How do I make a PDF?

• Using Word: Under “Save As . . .” choose the “PDF” option.
• Not using Word: LibreOffice Writer is free and good. LibreOffice is a free tool suite that does most of what MS Office does. It will read Word documents (and write them) and export to PDF. You can either create your resumé in LibreOffice in the first place, or just use it to create a PDF.