What is the Chicago Manual of Style?

What is the Chicago Manual of Style?

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS, CMOS, or Chicago) is a style guide for American English that covers topics from manuscript preparation to grammar, usage, and how to format citations. The CMS was first published in 1906 under the title Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of type in use. While its name has been shortened to Chicago Manual of Style, its content has grown from 200 pages in the first edition to 1000 pages in the 17^th edition.

 

The Chicago Manual of Style has two different citation systems: the Notes-Bibliography System (NB), which is used in the arts and humanities, and the Author-Date System, which is used in physical, natural, and social sciences; Business is a social science. Prof. Littrell prefers use of the Author-Date System for research and writing assignments in his courses.

Author-Date: Sample Citations

 The following examples illustrate the author-date system. Each example of a reference list entry is accompanied by an example of a corresponding in-text citation. For more details and many more examples, see chapter 15 of The Chicago Manual of Style. For examples of the same citations using the notes and bibliography system, follow the Notes and Bibliography link above.

Book

Reference list entries (in alphabetical order)

Grazer, Brian, and Charles Fishman. 2015. A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Smith, Zadie. 2016. Swing Time. New York: Penguin Press.

In-text citations

(Grazer and Fishman 2015, 12)

(Smith 2016, 315–16)

For more examples, see 15.40–45 in The Chicago Manual of Style.

Chapter or other part of an edited book

In the reference list, include the page range for the chapter or part. In the text, cite specific pages.

Reference list entry

Thoreau, Henry David. 2016. “Walking.” In The Making of the American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, 167–95. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

In-text citation

(Thoreau 2016, 177–78)

In some cases, you may want to cite the collection as a whole instead.

Reference list entry

D’Agata, John, ed. 2016. The Making of the American Essay. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

In-text citation

(D’Agata 2016, 177–78)

For more details, see 15.36 and 15.42 in The Chicago Manual of Style.

Translated book

Reference list entry

Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2016. In Other Words. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

In-text citation

(Lahiri 2016, 146)

E-book

For books consulted online, include a URL or the name of the database in the reference list entry. For other types of e-books, name the format. If no fixed page numbers are available, cite a section title or a chapter or other number in the text, if any (or simply omit).

Reference list entries (in alphabetical order)

Austen, Jane. 2007. Pride and Prejudice. New York: Penguin Classics. Kindle.

Borel, Brooke. 2016. The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ProQuest Ebrary.

Kurland, Philip B., and Ralph Lerner, eds. 1987. The Founders’ Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/.

Melville, Herman. 1851. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. New York: Harper & Brothers. http://mel.hofstra.edu/moby-dick-the-whale-proofs.html.

In-text citations

(Austen 2007, chap. 3)

(Borel 2016, 92)

(Kurland and Lerner 1987, chap. 10, doc. 19)

(Melville 1851, 627)

Journal article

In the reference list, include the page range for the whole article. In the text, cite specific page numbers. For articles consulted online, include a URL or the name of the database in the reference list entry. Many journal articles list a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). A DOI forms a permanent URL that begins https://doi.org/. This URL is preferable to the URL that appears in your browser’s address bar.

In-text citations

(Keng, Lin, and Orazem 2017, 9–10)

(LaSalle 2017, 95)

(Satterfield 2016, 170)

Journal articles often list many authors, especially in the sciences. If there are four or more authors, list up to ten in the reference list; in the text, list only the first, followed by et al. (“and others”). For more than ten authors (not shown here), list the first seven in the reference list, followed by et al.

Reference list entry

Bay, Rachael A., Noah Rose, Rowan Barrett, Louis Bernatchez, Cameron K. Ghalambor, Jesse R. Lasky, Rachel B. Brem, Stephen R. Palumbi, and Peter Ralph. 2017. “Predicting Responses to Contemporary Environmental Change Using Evolutionary Response Architectures.” American Naturalist 189, no. 5 (May): 463–73. https://doi.org/10.1086/691233.

In-text citation

(Bay et al. 2017, 465)

For more examples, see 15.46–49 in The Chicago Manual of Style.

News or magazine article

Articles from newspapers or news sites, magazines, blogs, and the like are cited similarly. In the reference list, it can be helpful to repeat the year with sources that are cited also by month and day. Page numbers, if any, can be cited in the text but are omitted from a reference list entry. If you consulted the article online, include a URL or the name of the database.

In-text citation

(Manjoo 2017)

(Mead 2017, 43)

(Pai 2017)

(Pegoraro 2007)

Readers’ comments are cited in the text but omitted from a reference list.

In-text citation

(Eduardo B [Los Angeles], March 9, 2017, comment on Manjoo 2017)

For more examples, see 15.49 (newspapers and magazines) and 15.51 (blogs) in The Chicago Manual of Style.

Book review

Reference list entry

Kakutani, Michiko. 2016. “Friendship Takes a Path That Diverges.” Review of Swing Time, by Zadie Smith. New York Times, November 7, 2016.

In-text citation

(Kakutani 2016)

Interview

Reference list entry

Stamper, Kory. 2017. “From ‘F-Bomb’ to ‘Photobomb,’ How the Dictionary Keeps Up with English.” Interview by Terry Gross. Fresh Air, NPR, April 19, 2017. Audio, 35:25. http://www.npr.org/2017/04/19/524618639/from-f-bomb-to-photobomb-how-the-dictionary-keeps-up-with-english.

In-text citation

(Stamper 2017)

Thesis or dissertation

Reference list entry

Rutz, Cynthia Lillian. 2013. “ King Lear and Its Folktale Analogues.” PhD diss., University of Chicago.

In-text citation

(Rutz 2013, 99–100)

Website content

It is often sufficient simply to describe web pages and other website content in the text (“As of May 1, 2017, Yale’s home page listed...”). If a more formal citation is needed, it may be styled like the examples below. For a source that does not list a date of publication or revision, use n.d. (for “no date”) in place of the year and include an access date.

In-text citations

(Bouman 2016)

(Google 2017)

(Yale University, n.d.)

For more examples, see 15.50–52 in The Chicago Manual of Style. For multimedia, including live performances, see 15.57.

Social media content

Citations of content shared through social media can usually be limited to the text (as in the first example below). If a more formal citation is needed, a reference list entry may be appropriate. In place of a title, quote up to the first 160 characters of the post. Comments are cited in reference to the original post.

Text

Conan O’Brien’s tweet was characteristically deadpan: “In honor of Earth Day, I’m recycling my tweets” (@ConanOBrien, April 22, 2015).

In-text citations

(Chicago Manual of Style 2015)

(Souza 2016)

(Michele Truty, April 17, 2015, 1:09 p.m., comment on Chicago Manual of Style 2015)

Personal communication

Personal communications, including email and text messages and direct messages sent through social media, are usually cited in the text only; they are rarely included in a reference list.

 

Author-Date Sample Paper

General CMOS Guidelines

• Text should be consistently double-spaced, except for block quotations, notes, bibliography entries, table titles, and figure captions.
• For block quotations, which are also called extracts:
• A prose quotation of five or more lines, or more than 100 words, should be blocked.
• CMOS recommends blocking two or more lines of poetry.
• A blocked quotation does not get enclosed in quotation marks.
• A blocked quotation must always begin a new line.
• Blocked quotations should be indented with the word processor’s indention tool.
• Page numbers begin in the header of the first page of text with Arabic number 1.
• Subheadings should be used for longer papers.

· For CMOS and Turabian’s recommendations, see “Headings,” below.

Major Paper Sections

TITLE PAGE

• According to Turabian style, class papers will either include a title page or include the title on the first page of the text. Use the following guidelines should your instructor or context require a title page:

o The title should be centered a third of the way down the page.

o Your name, class information, and the date should follow several lines later.

o For subtitles, end the title line with a colon and place the subtitle on the line below the title.

o Double-space each line of the title page

CMOS Title Page

• Different practices apply for theses and dissertations (see Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, ad Dissertations [8^th ed.].

MAIN BODY

• Titles mentioned in the text, notes, or bibliography are capitalized “headline-style,” meaning first words of titles and subtitles and any important words thereafter should be capitalized.
• Titles in the text as well as in notes and bibliographies are treated with quotation marks or italics based on the type of work they name.
• Book and periodical titles (titles of larger works) should be italicized.
• Article and chapter titles (titles of shorter works) should be enclosed in double quotation marks.
• The titles of most poems should be enclosed in double quotation marks, but the titles of very long poems should be italicized.
• Titles of plays should be italicized.
• Otherwise, take a minimalist approach to capitalization.
• For example, use lowercase terms to describe periods, except in the case of proper nouns (e.g., “the colonial period,” vs. “the Victorian era”).
• A prose quotation of five or more lines should be “blocked.” The block quotation should match the surrounding text, and it takes no quotation marks. To offset the block quote from surrounding text, indent the entire quotation using the word processor’s indentation tool. It is also possible to offset the block quotation by using a different or smaller font than the surrounding text.

In Flowers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Rose eloquently sums up his argument in the following quotation:

In a society of control, a politics of conduct is
designed into the fabric of existence itself, into the
organization of space, time, visibility, circuits of
communication. And these enwrap each individual life
decision and action—about labour [sic], purchases, debts,
credits, lifestyle, sexual contracts and the like—in a web
of incitements, rewards, current sanctions and foreboding
of future sanctions which serve to enjoin citizens to
maintain particular types of control over their conduct.
These assemblages which entail the securitization of
identity are not unified, but dispersed, not hierarchical
but rhizomatic, not totalized but connected in a web or
relays and relations. (246)

REFERENCES

• Label the first page of your back matter, your comprehensive list of sources, “Bibliography” (for Notes and Bibliography style) or “References” (for Author-Date style).
• Leave two blank lines between “Bibliography” or “References” and your first entry.
• Leave one blank line between remaining entries.
• List entries in letter-by-letter alphabetical order according to the first word in each entry, be that the author's name or the title of the piece..
• Use “and,” not an ampersand, “&,” for multi-author entries.
• For two to three authors, write out all names.
• For four to ten authors, write out all names in the bibliography but only the first author’s name plus “et al.” in notes and parenthetical citations.
• When a source has no identifiable author, cite it by its title, both on the references page and in shortened form (up to four keywords from that title) in parenthetical citations throughout the text.
• Write out publishers’ names in full.
• Do not use access dates unless publication dates are unavailable.
• If you cannot ascertain the publication date of a printed work, use the abbreviation “n.d.”
• Provide DOIs instead of URLs whenever possible.
• If no DOI is available, provide a URL.
• If you cannot name a specific page number when called for, you have other options: section (sec.), equation (eq.), volume (vol.), or note (n.).

CMOS Bibliography Page:

FOOTNOTES

• Note numbers should begin with “1” and follow consecutively throughout a given paper.
• In the text:
• Note numbers are superscripted.
• Note numbers should be placed at the end of the clause or sentence to which they refer and should be placed after all punctuation, except for the dash.
• In the footnotes:
• Note numbers are full-sized, not raised, and followed by a period (superscripting note numbers in the notes themselves is also acceptable).
• Lines within a footnote should be formatted flush left. Place commentary after source documentation when a footnote contains both; separate commentary and documentation by a period.
• In parenthetical citation, separate documentation from brief commentary with a semicolon.
• Do not repeat the hundreds digit in a page range if it does not change from the beginning to the end of the range.

For more information on footnotes, please see CMOS NB Sample Paper.

HEADINGS

While The Chicago Manual of Style does not include a prescribed system for formatting headings and subheads, it makes several recommendations.

• Maintain consistency and parallel structure in headings and subheads.
• Use headline-style for purposes of capitalization.
• Subheadings should begin on a new line.
• Subheadings can be distinguished by font-size.
• Ensure that each level of hierarchy is clear and consistent.
• Levels of subheads can be differentiated by type style, use of boldface or italics, and placement on the page, usually either centered or flush left.
• Use no more than three levels of hierarchy.
• Avoid ending subheadings with periods.

Turabian Subheading Plan

Chicago Headings