This was a big style-update year at the American Copy Editors Society (ACES) meeting. The Associated Press usually announces style book changes at the meeting every year, but this year the Chicago Manual of Style also announced updates, which only happens every once in a while. The last time Chicago made changes, for example, was when it released the 16th edition back in 2010.
As we’ve talked about before, there are many style books and many different reasons to use them, but people tend to use the Chicago Manual of Style when they are writing books or doing some kinds of academic writing, and people tend to use the AP Stylebook when they are writing for newspapers and websites, although, of course, there are other reasons to use both.
Chicago Manual of Style Updates
Carol Fisher Saller, the editor of the Chicago Manual of Style's online Q&A and the author of The Subversive Copy Editor (@SubvCopyEd on Twitter), gave a presentation at the ACES conference on the major updates you’ll find in the 17th edition of Chicago which will come out in September, and she didn't waste any time getting to the good stuff, announcing that the word internet will now be lowercase in Chicago style and that the word email will lose the hyphen.
Both these changes were popular in the room and on the internet, where most people were glad to have Chicago come into line with changes other style books have been making over the last few years.
‘Ibid.’ versus Short Citations
Another significant change is that the 17th edition will recommend using shortened citations instead of using ibid. when you have multiple references in a row from the same source.
Ibid. is a Latin abbreviation that means “in the same place,” and in the past you used it to keep from having to write out identical or similar citation information over and over again. For example, if reference 20 was for page 56 of a book, and reference 21 was from page 68 of the same book, you could write out all the information for the book in reference 20, and then in reference 21, you could just write Ibid., 68. to let readers know all the information was the same as the previous reference, except for the page number.
This saves a lot of typing, but the problem is that in electronic documents, citations are often active, which means you can sometimes click on reference 21 and go right to it without ever seeing reference 20. So if you see ibid., then you have to go searching for the reference before it to find the information you need. That’s a pain, and it’s an especially big pain if you have a bunch of ibid. references in a row, so you have to keep going back and back until you find the first reference for all the ibids.
To solve these problems, Chicago now recommends using shortened citations instead of ibid., and it sounds like the format for shortened citations is the same as it was in the 16th edition.
Twitter and Facebook Citation Formats
In another citation-related update, the 17th edition will include citation styles for Facebook posts, tweets and other types of social media posts, but Saller didn’t reveal what they are yet. I presume, it will all become clear when the new Manual of Style will be released in September. One thing that seems funny now is that she said when the last edition of Chicago came out in 2010, they didn’t include a Twitter citation format because they thought Twitter might be just a flash in the pan.
And yet it was on Twitter, by following the #ACES2017 hashtag that I was able to follow along and learn about all these updates even though I wasn’t able to attend the conference in person.
‘US’ versus ‘United States’
A small change that was nonetheless cheered by people on Twitter was that Chicago will now allow writers to use the abbreviation US for United States as a noun as well as an adjective. In the 16th edition, the entry on “US” versus United States said “In running text, spell out United States as a noun.”
For example, you would have written In the United States, people tend to spell the word gray with an A, but now in Chicago style it’s also OK to write In the US, people tend to spell the word gray with an A.
Hyphens in Chicago Style
Moving on to punctuation, Saller says Chicago strengthened its general aversion to hyphens, but is going to make some hyphenation-related updates and keep the huge hyphenation table, which makes me happy because I refer to that table a lot. Despite the stated hyphenation aversion, she did mention two words that will now explicitly be hyphenated: decision-making (which was previously two words, also known as an open compound) and head-hunting (which wasn’t in the 16th edition).
Comma Changes and Clarifications
Finally, Saller reviewed changes and clarifications to a couple of comma entries.
First, commas are typically used to introduce quotations after phrases such as Squiggly said and Jeffrey asked, but the new edition of Chicago will clarify an instance when a comma isn’t needed: “When a quotation forms a syntactical part of the sentence, no comma is needed to introduce it.”
Second, Chicago no longer calls for a comma after the abbreviation etc. unless the surrounding grammar calls for it. The current Chicago entry says that if you write something like She usually plays puzzle games such as Candy Crush, Triple Town, etc., when her kids are at soccer practice you’d put a comma after etc. But the new edition says to leave out the comma, which makes sense to me because if etc. were the name of another game, you wouldn’t put a comma there, and it doesn’t seem like an abbreviation for and other things should need one either.
But, if the sentence itself would call for a comma if you were using something other than etc., use a comma where you normally would. For example you’d use one in this sentence: She used to play puzzle games such as Candy Crush, Triple Town, etc., but lately she’s been listening to audiobooks instead. You use a comma after the etc. in that sentence because you’re joining two main clauses with a conjunction, and whether there’s an etc. there or some other word, the grammar of that sentence calls for a comma.
So those are the major Chicago Manual of Style updates, although I’m sure there will be many more small changes to discover once the new edition becomes available in September. And note that once the 17th edition is available on the Chicago website, Saller said they will no longer support the 15th edition. In other words, online subscribers will continue to have access to the two most recent editions like they do now.
AP Style Updates
Next, let’s talk a bit about the updates to the AP Stylebook. There seemed to be a lot more updates than there were to Chicago, or it could be that the AP is just a little farther along in the release process because these updates are on the AP website now and go into effect immediately.
I already did a long article on the website about the updates, and I’m talking with ragan.com about doing an updated AP Stylebook web course, but I’ll still go over some of the major or more interesting changes today in the podcast.
Technology-Related Updates
The editors presented a few additions related to new or newish technology. There’s a new entry for autonomous vehicles for example, which can also be called self-driving cars. But don’t call them “driverless” unless there isn’t a human backup driver. And reserve the terms autonomous and self-driving for cars or trucks that can monitor the road and drive for an entire trip without human help. For vehicles that can do some but not all of the driving, such as some Tesla models, use the terms semi-autonomous or partially self-driving.
Another new entry is for the term cyberattack, which is one word and the editors noted is an often overused word. Throughout the presentation, it was interesting to hear the editors talk about how they consulted with experts in different fields for certain entries, and cyberattack was one of those entries. The definition is that a cyberattack is computer operation carried out over a device or network that causes physical damage or significant and wide-spread disruption, and the presenters said that the cybersecurity experts felt strongly about the "physical damage or significant and wide-spread disruption" part—that it isn’t a cyberattack unless it meets at least one of those criteria. For example, someone who just messes with a company’s homepage is an online vandal or cybercriminal, but if someone wipes an entire data center full of computers bringing down half the internet, that person is properly described as a cyberattacker.
Esports is another new entry, and interestingly, at least to me, I had never heard the term before, but the morning before the AP presentation, my husband was telling me about a fascinating article about how big the esports industry is and how some colleges are giving scholarships to gamers who participate in esports competitions. And then esports also showed up as a new entry in the Stylebook, which defines it as competitive multiplayer video gaming. Again, they consulted with people in the esports industry before deciding to style the word without a hyphen.
The final technology-related entry I’ll talk about today is the virtual reality, augmented reality entry, and the Stylebook treats these two terms differently because the editors believe people are more familiar with the concept of virtual reality than augmented reality. Therefore, it’s OK to use VR to abbreviate virtual reality on the second reference, but not OK to abbreviate augmented reality as AR. People are less likely to know what that means, so for now, you should continue to spell it out.
General Updates
Next are a few general updates to existing entries.
For courtesy titles such as Mr. and Mrs, the AP now says not to use courtesy titles except in direct quotations. If you need to distinguish between people who use the same last name, such as married couples or brothers and sisters, they recommend using the first and last name in your text.
The spelling of flier/flyer got an update, and I’ve always found this to be a confusing topic because the AP didn’t match a lot of other sources, but now they do. Yay. It’s now more clear that if it’s a handbill, you spell it flyer. Frequent flyer is also spelled with a Y, which the AP says is a change it made after surveying airline industry websites. So now, pretty much the only time you need to use the flier spelling is in the idiom take a flier, which means “to take a big risk.”
Finally, we can hardly talk about stylebook updates without someone bringing up the serial comma (or Oxford comma), right? The AP Stylebook still does not recommend the comma before the final and in a simple series such as red, white, and blue, but the new entry does clarify that there are many instances where the serial comma is needed for clarity, and when it is, AP writers should use it. This was always the rule, but they felt like a lot of people weren’t getting it, so they rewrote the entry to try to make it more clear.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar