Chicago Manual of Style
From ResonantWiki
C. J. Cherryh wrote on her web page The Panel Room:
DO YOU HATE S'S?
seamstress's thimble substituted for seamstress' thimble?
traveling instead of the phonics-friendly travelling?
gray instead of grey?
leaped instead of leapt? No more dreamt, dwellt, or, I suppose, swept...and never mind what people actually say.
double quotes instead of single when the enclosed words are not spoken, but ironical in nature...an 'honest' gentleman?
...and a thousand other examples of the usage you've lately seen in American books?
Recently various American publishers adopted the Chicago manual of style as the official standard for their copyeditors. No matter the style or literacy of the writer, no matter that the book might be set in another time and place, the new standard declares that comma splices are fine, but travelling has to be re-spelled as traveling.
I detest the Chicago manual as a national disgrace, not only because it creates ugly combinations like ss's, but because I remember why it was created, and by whom it was created. It was a teaching device accompanying the New Math, and it was designed to dumb-down the rules of English to make it easier for see-it, say-it methods...later discredited and no longer used by enlightened school systems who now insist on higher standards, and phonics. But in that day, teachers voted on the changes, hoping to establish 'easier' English. This abomination won, but not without bitter dispute that broke friendships. It was intended as a method to arrive at minimal standardized literacy for the average student by running roughshod over the historical basis of the language. When the see-it, say-it teaching method failed, the manual should have been given unhallowed burial. It certainly was never designed to be swept [sweeped?] up as a national standard.
In a terrible accident of timing, however, American publishers were looking for their own guide book to the English language. Rather than going with Webster, which provides a perfectly sensible standard, they went with the Chicago manual, and imposed it over writers' vehement protests.
If you also protest this trend, direct your comments to the editor in charge. If writers protest, we're being prima donnas and unsympathetic to the need to have an 'American standard' of English.
And if an ordinarily literate writer brings out a new book rife with hard-to-read fragments, consider this possibility: a copyeditor armed with that damnable document as a standard, hellbent on removing colons and replacing them with periods to 'dumb-down' the sentences. Consider c/e's who blithely pass over the occasional change in a character's eye-color while prosecuting such grand felonies as 'travelling' instead of 'traveling' or 'grey' instead of the sacred American 'gray'. Sometimes the c/e's attempt to simplify the sentence actually reverses the meaning, so if you're left scratching your head in wonder at an apparent lapse of logic, consider what would happen with the substitution of one word for another, the insertion of a comma where the author never intended one, or the division of a sentence in which one statement led to the other [the useful function of a colon] into two no-longer-related parts.
Often the writer isn't allowed to see this desecration before the work is set in type.
If we complain, we rouse resentment and generally end up with a mad editor, so don't quote me: I have to fight individual and specific battles for the integrity of my work, often hundreds of them per book, and I raise all the waves I can bear. I can guarantee you that if you ever read one of my manuscripts cold, in typescript, it will generally contain far fewer mistakes than the typeset version...and yes, we often do set type from my computer disk, but after a copyeditor has been at it, happily 'correcting' all my s' to s's as if I were illiterate.
The readers, however, make an strong impression when they object. When you're faced with books by any writer that seem uncommonly full of errors, do the writer a favor and write the editor at the address generally given on the back of the title page. Tell the editor in polite words ~[always more effective] that you're not used to this many errors in a given writer's work at other houses or in prior books. Raise merry hell about bad copyediting...and if you agree with me, tell them what you think about the Chicago manual of style while you're at it.
