Associate Editor Lily Davenport: The CR fiction team is closing in on our final round of acceptances for the upcoming issue, which means I’ve been spending more time than usual reading the fiction queue and discussing stories with my coworkers. While we never make acceptance/rejection decisions based on how a given piece does or does not follow the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) guidelines, I do think about the sometimes-messy intersections of personal style with editorial guidelines while I read—if we accept a story that approaches sentence structure or formatting in an unusual way, we also need to be prepared to work with it on its own terms during the copyediting and proofreading processes. Our aim is always to prioritize the writer’s goals for the piece, while also maintaining editorial consistency across the entire issue, and the Manual is our go-to resource for making those judgment calls.
I love the Manual, which is huge and unruly and possessed of a dry, understated sense of humor, and I admire its quixotic ambition to encompass every possible use case in written academic English. And, on the flip side, CMOS is also a useful entry point for thinking about the personal and political ramifications of our work as editors—like any “standardizing” text, it was built by human beings with distinct backgrounds, perspectives, privileges, and biases, and some of that baggage inevitably got baked in along the way. I’m excited to highlight my favorite parts of the Manual here, along with the sections that continue to trouble me.
This is the second installment of this column to cover the latest—eighteenth!—edition of the Manual. The new edition debuted, in print and online, on September 19, with a shiny new color scheme and well over 150 changes significant enough to merit specific attention in the cheat sheet published on the website. (Yes, I looked up the rule for using numbers in dates when only the month and day are provided; it’s still 9.33, “Month and Day,” while the rule for numbering chapters and sections remains 9.28, “Page Numbers, Chapter Numbers, and so Forth.” ) This time around, I’ll be highlighting some of the updates that apply most directly to fiction writers: more, and more concrete, guidance around rendering speech and dialogue on the page.
As a fiction writer—and, maybe more importantly, as a person who is detail-oriented to a fault and often needs to have seemingly minor questions answered, and technical elements nailed down, before I start doing anything—I have always had a love/hate relationship with dialogue. When I first started writing, no one could give me an explicit set of rules for managing speech on the page; also, I had written maybe one story ever when I decided to get serious about the whole thing, so of course all my dialogue was bad, and writing it made me want to rip out my fingernails.
I would spend hours crunched up in a knot at my dorm-room desk, sweating in terror over what seemed like laughably basic, but also insurmountable, problems: Where does the punctuation go, relative to the quotation mark, if the sentence keeps going after the dialogue? Do I always need a tag to identify the speaker? Do I still need to start the speech on a new line if someone starts talking at the very end of a paragraph, and does it matter if they were also talking at the paragraph’s beginning? What happens to the start of the next sentence, punctuation-wise, if the previous sentence was a line of dialogue that ended with ellipses or a dash? How the hell does anyone get their made-up people to talk to each other like real people?? I knew I needed dialogue for my work to function, but it also reliably turned me into an anxious pill bug posing as a human being. (This only got worse when I arrived at an MFA program home to many experimental writers, where I discovered that some people italicized their dialogue, some just signaled speech with a capital letter in the middle of an existing line, and some didn’t typographically mark off their dialogue at all, relying entirely on tone shifts and the rhythm of their syntax.)
While the new CMOS guidelines wouldn’t have kept me from wildly overthinking my college workshop stories, or from feeling bad about writing terrible scenes, they definitely would have saved me some time and worry on the technicalities. This chunk of the Manual has expanded from seven rules to fifteen, and directly addresses fiction writers for the first time, with brief introductory material noting that “the advice in this section draws mainly on conventions for fiction, including novels and short stories,” with the caveat that fiction and scholarly prose share a common goal in using quoted material: “to differentiate the words of a narrator from the words of others” (CMOS 12.39). Some of the additions outline use cases I’ve fretted about for years: I was delighted to see that, in place of the seventeenth edition’s spare rule on “numerals in direct discourse” (13.44), the new edition covers numerals and abbreviations in dialogue in one expansive swoop (12.51). You might assume that no reasonable person would worry about whether they should spell out “Dr.” or “AT&T”—the two examples used in the Manual—in dialogue. Either you’d be wrong, or I am not a reasonable person. Maybe both.
Similarly, 12.48 addresses alternative methods for delineating dialogue, with an extended passage from The Color Purple (1982) as an example of the everything-but-the-quotation-marks method, and descriptions of strategies ranging from line breaks paired with em dashes to “a combination of punctuation, capitalization, and context.” I also appreciate that interrupted speech, faltering speech, and stuttering now have individual sections (12.42, 12.43, and 12.44, respectively), rather than being lumped together as in the previous edition.
I’m less enthused about some of the other additions—particularly the recommendation, in 12.41 (“Speaker tags”), to avoid tag verbs that “do not necessarily suggest literal speech.” This section describes verbs such as “sighed” and “laughed” as cases that an editor should query but permit if the author feels strongly about their presence; it recommends more strongly against “frowned” and its ilk. While this is clearly meant as a purple-prose prophylactic, and while I do agree that in the majority of cases it’s better to use a verb intended for speech in dialogue tags, I can’t help but bristle at the restrictive implications. I’m also peeved at 12.49’s recommendation to keep italics for internal dialogue to “at most a sentence or two here and there,” even in longer pieces of writing. This sentence filled me with an impulse to graffiti the Manual with passages from Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts (2019), a wonderful and italics-replete novel that probably made its copyeditor weep blood.
It’s not that I don’t want there to be rules. I’m speaking as both a writer and an editor when I say this: we desperately need rules. We need the Manual to, on occasion, rescue us from the worst and messiest versions of ourselves—or, at least, from the versions of us that privilege ego above editorial consistency and, sometimes, common sense. It’s more that I want the rules to come across as, themselves, not a product of ego; for the spirits of openness and experimentation to abide. This is a little like the ongoing conflicts between CMOS and Merriam-Webster, its dictionary of choice: it’s an oversimplication to say that the former prescribes while the latter describes, but not much of one. The Manual is better at telling writers and editors where we’ve been than showing us where we are, or indicating where we’re going, and that’s fine. (It’s a style guide, not a fortune teller.) I’m grateful for, and on the whole very pleased with, the changes made to CMOS’s treatment of speech on the page—ultimately, I’m just nitpicking, and quibbling with the tone.
