We've always been seeing "Chicago Manual of Style" used as a standard for submissions to magazines and even literary journals. And in case you are also wondering what Chicago recommends in terms of capitalization, abbreviations, etc., here are the top tips taken from the manual:
Capitalization in Titles
Example: The material in the newsletter is kept up to date. (There’s no noun following up to date, so it shouldn’t be hyphenated.)
(Note: as a matter of copyright, these were not taken directly from the manual, but from internet sources citing Chicago Manual of Style as a guide.)
Capitalization in Titles
- Always capitalize the first and the last word.
- Capitalize all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinate conjunctions ("as", "because", "although").
- Lowercase all articles, coordinate conjunctions ("and", "or", "nor"), and prepositions regardless of length, when they are other than the first or last word.
- Lowercase the "to" in an infinitive.
- Use periods with abbreviations that appear in lowercase letters;
- Use no periods with abbreviations that appear in full capitals or small capitals, whether two letters or more.
- No space is left between the letters of initialisms and acronyms, whether lowercase or in capitals.
- Space is usually left between abbreviated words.
- Noun forms are usually uppercase (HIV, VP), adverbial forms lowercase (rpm, mpg).
- Abbreviations are italicized only if they stand for a term that would be italicized if spelled out—the title of a book or periodical, for example.
- Common Latin abbreviations are set in roman.
- No space is left on either side of an ampersand used within an initialism.
- A parenthetical statement at the end of a sentence is punctuated outside of the closing parenthesis (like this).
- (A parenthetical sentence is punctuated within the parentheses.)
- In American English, periods and commas are within quotation marks, like “this period.”
- Other punctuation (!,?) is “outside”!
- The Chicago Manual of Style states that "Web sites" and "Web pages" are correct. After all, we’re referring to the World Wide Web, so Web should always be capitalized. The book uses Web pages (sites) as two words.
- E-mail stands for electronic mail. According to Chicago, e-mail should contain the hyphen, and it doesn’t have to be capitalized (E-mail).
- Chicago believes that capital letters used as words that contain no interior periods can be made plural by simply adding an s. However, lowercase letters do require an apostrophe and an s.
- When a conjunction joins the last two elements in a series, a comma ... should appear before the conjunction. Chicago strongly recommends this widely practiced usage. (e.g., She took a photograph of her parents, the president, and the vice president.)
- Compound adjectives + noun—hyphenate when the adjectives appear before a noun but not if used after
Example: The material in the newsletter is kept up to date. (There’s no noun following up to date, so it shouldn’t be hyphenated.)
(Note: as a matter of copyright, these were not taken directly from the manual, but from internet sources citing Chicago Manual of Style as a guide.)
