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RR 2005/121 The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition) University of Chicago Press Chicago, IL and London 2004 xvii + 956 pp. ISBN 0 226 10403 6 £38.50 $55 Keywords Publishing, Text editing Review DOI 10.1108/09504120510587436
In our age when self-publishing is so easy and so frequent, advice like this becomes ever more necessary. This is reflected in the preface that talks of "the increasing proportion of our users who work with magazines, newsletters, corporate reports, proposals, electronic publications, web sites, and other non-book or non-print documents". You can lead a horse to water of course, and the pity is that this volume is likely to remain largely confined to "professional" users: still, we see enough errors of all kinds from established publishing outlets to make this (and its competitor, or perhaps companion titles from Cambridge and Oxford University Presses and others) ever more vital. The brave new world is addressed here with new sections on preparing electronic publications, and these include the "kind of editing and proof-reading they require". Getting right back to basics, another new feature for this edition is a chapter on grammar and usage, which "shows how to put words and phrases together to achieve clarity, warns against pomposity, and identifies common errors". If only life were that simple, but every attempt is to be...