The Chicago Manual of Style

I am currently writing my senior project for the final year of my undergraduate degree. I constantly use the CMoS whenever I'm writing papers, or forget how to properly cite various documents. Excellent resource.

The Chicago Manual of Style's Fifteenth Edition is a comprehensive and quality guide for professional writers, editors, and publishers. My current focus is on conforming to Chicago Style conventions, copy editing and formatting of my Doctoral Dissertation. I find that Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th Edition is a more useful resource for this present endeavor. My intention in writing this review is not to be overly critical of the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition. Since Amazon Books offers new copies at an extremely resonable price, the investment in this book is more than a worthwhile one.

As an author, I based the style rules on this book. It is great to have a single source of truth for style and grammar rules.

My only gripe is that everyone should use this one source of truth. Instead, newspapers use AP Style, University professors will use MLA, and other authors use thier industry guidlines. The result is confusion on right and wrong usage.

Going forward, every author, whether news, books, or technical white papers should use this book as its authority.

For a writer, the Chicago Manual of Style answers every question about writing and publishing you may have and many more that you haven't thought of. I look up one item and continue reading. Great resource for writers.

The Chicago Manual of Style is a basic requirement for reference when editing for any academic press or dealing with works that require adherence to scholarly formats. There are a few instances where the Manual ducks responsibility and leaves matters up to individual authors and editors, but overall it gives succinct guidelines that make sense. Used in tandem with the online Chicago Manual it helps immensely in dealing with thorny issues of syntax and style.