The Chicago Bible of Style

The Dananator Takes a Love-ahIllustration by
Master Matt
Style has many contrasting qualities, much like an affair. It can be fabulous, tacky, impromptu, premeditated, tawdry, passionate, casual, and glamorous. It can begin with a wayward glance or a knowing smile or a simple sheet of paper. Case in point, the Chicago Manual of Style.

The Chicago Manual of Style started as a single sheet of paper. Someone (who was this creator, lost in the mists of obscurity?) bothered to make a list of basic typographical considerations and methods of citations to serve as an in-house style sheet specifically for the University of Chicago Press. In the beginning, it was a casual dalliance.

But somehow, subtly, it took hold and began to grow into a more solid, substantial romance. Slowly, word of it began to spread, and eventually its roots grew deep into university life and it branched out to become nationally and then internationally respected.

Now it sits on my desk, a venerable and stately tome. Or, a 984-page orange monstrosity cataloguing every nit and every pick that relates to any print or text or type that you can think of. Ah, The Chicago Manual of Style: a name that mentally drapes frothy layers of chiffon over some very hard edges. “Style,” you say? A manual of “style”? How lovely! Style is an individual thing, something that welcomes whimsy and combines creativity and panache. Interesting, then, that when I heave open The Chicago Manual of Style—CMS—I can also find style—that elusive, gossamer expression of individuality—pinned down like a chloroformed butterfly on a wax tray.

I’ve always had difficulty trying to teach my students writing “style,” either the analysis of the style of others, or the cultivation of their own. When I point out an example of a certain writer’s style, there is almost no way to explain how it is identifiable as such. Sure, I can tell them to look at word choices, sentence lengths, rhythm of language, cadence of dialogue, but ultimately, the example I have chosen is one instance of what one person decided to do with one particular language situation—never to be repeated.

But of course, one’s writing style does have a nuance, it leaves that taste it your mouth, drips with that je ne sais quoi. Really: je ne sais quoi. And if je ne sais, you can imagine what my students are thinking. Style is a certain way of moving, speaking, looking, doing, choosing—a certain way, but not necessarily a particular way, or the same way every time.

More maddening by far is trying to teach my students how to use The Chicago Manual of Style.

The inevitable protest: “But why? Why does the comma have to go there in my citation?” And from some of the more informed ones: “Ancient Greeks didn’t have punctuation. Are you telling me that Plato would have gotten a C on his bibliography?” Or: “Look at ee cummings and bell hooks—they did awright.”

I explain patiently, that we need consistency. We need all the sources cited in a universal format so they are immediately comprehensible to all.

“So if I put the page numbers before the publication date, it would become incomprehensible to you?”

Well, no. I guess that would be fine. Other things would also be fine. If you mix up ibid and the 3-em dash, the academy would survive. If your page range is indicated by a hyphen instead of an en dash, the ivory tower would not crumble.

Granted, it wouldn’t be good if bibliographies were composed in the style of e e cummings, but somehow I doubt it would come to that. So why the rigidity? Why has the CMS become such a colossus, so admired and yet so feared?

I believe a clue may lie in its nickname: The Bible. People use bibles to find hope. To receive comfort. To prove that they’re right. To condemn the deeds of others. To brush up against omnipotence and even, after much study, to claim it as theirs.

The nickname is eerily appropriate, although at times it does come up lacking. The CMS does not particularly inspire hope to students who have to compile a bibliography from a compost heap of books and papers at 4 AM after writing for 13 hours straight. Nor do its pages produce much comfort, even as an impromptu pillow.

But on a more general level, the nickname is right on. After all, it’s got chapters. And verses, of a sort. With its paper cover off, it even resembles a religious text. It’s only missing an embossed dove on its cover. In fact, it reminds me of the hymnal that was in the church I went to when I was a little girl. I can almost hear Father Kincade’s voice booming from the lectern: “Please open your CMS to page 302 and join us in singing ‘Hyphenation Guide For Compounds, Combining Forms, and Prefixes,’ verses 3 and 4.”

I do, in fact, think of the CMS as a sort of Catholic Church. It is demanding, exacting, exhausting, mostly unreasonable, and often ambiguous. There has even been a Schism. APA, AMA, MLA, and Turabian styles are all similar, competing style guides that were adapted from the original CMS.

Also, like the Catholic Church, the CMS has followers—some casual, some fanatics. It is tempting to look at the CMS and marvel at its infallibility, its utter ironclad correctness. If you sit very still in front of it you can feel a slight tug, such is its gravitas. I count myself among those too easily wooed by its 77-page index.

That is, until I heard about the Green Bay Packers. I recently took a course called Basic Manuscript Editing, which was all CMS, all the time. One night as I sat in class wide-eyed with indoctrination, our instructor mentioned in a humorous aside an example sentence in section 6.83 that featured the Green Bay Packers. She told us that the editor in charge of that section is a huge Green Bay fan, so he tried to include the Packers whenever he could in the examples.

What?

Had she just said that some guy had made up this example? And that this guy, whoever he was, edited only one section, implying that there were other unknown guys editing other sections, themselves gratuitously inserting other arbitrary sports teams?

I couldn’t fathom that there was a human being behind that example. Did it not just rise unbidden from the mists of omnipotence? Were its original letters not carefully scribed on crumbling papyrus now hidden in a clay jar at the back of some desert cave?

No, that example was not penned by the hand of the almighty, but by some guy. An editor at the University of Chicago. Someone not unwise, certainly, but who equally certainly did not send his seraphim to get him another cup of coffee or to run to Medici to pick up some lunch. Perhaps this man is slightly balding, with tortoiseshell rimmed glasses and a cracked front tooth. If he only knew my mental scrutiny, he would freeze immediately, or maybe make a flustered attempt to conceal his work, as did the little man behind the great Wizard of Oz.

But however he looks, he is a Green Bay fan. If he were a Dallas fan, the CMS would read differently.

We like our bibles set in stone, unyielding and universal in both their essentials and their particulars. We take comfort in making and referring to comprehensive guides to things that can never truly have comprehensive guides. Dr. Spock wrote a comprehensive guide to children, and consequently a generation was raised in a certain style. The style was not all bad, or all good. He advocated a certain pattern, one man’s way of handling a series of possible incidents, suggesting particular choices that can never truly imitated or repeated because they are each unique, like the children themselves.

Someone made a list of typographical considerations, and now thousands of students struggle to write in a certain style, twisting and contorting language until the very thoughts they are striving to articulate are lost, their uncertain beauty painted over by meaningless consistency.

Someone, or perhaps more accurately a group of guys, wrote something that was compiled into the book we now call the Bible, and now untold numbers of people live their lives in a certain style. This style is not all bad, or all good. It advocates rules to which nearly everything seems an exception. It strongly advises courses of action for situations that will never occur again, just so, in the modern world. Its nuances are interpreted in as many ways as there are readers. Yet people live and die—and kill—by it.

Some things shouldn’t have manuals, not because the manuals are bad but because we abuse them with our trust. Unfortunately, the manuals prone to this blend in with those that bear up much better under blind confidence. The manual for your Mac? Sure, tattoo it on your arm. It will never disappoint. The DVD instruction guide? Yes, by all means, organize your life by its precepts and you will never blink 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. The TIAA-Cref manual? Bow your head over its pages and search for the meaning of life therein, and your medical benefits will be none the worse for the wear. But manuals for children, language, or morality? These are the manuals that should come with a warning—maybe a Green Bay logo emblazoned across the cover.