Chicago Manual Of Style Guidelines: Quickstudy Digital Guide

What Is CMOS?

CMOS defines the editorial style of the University of Chicago Press, a major publisher of academic books and journals. The press has published its style guide in various editions since 1906.

Over time, other publishing organizations have adopted CMOS rules for their own work.

The flexibility and expansiveness of the rules make CMOS style useful for a number of contexts, including academic research papers and business reports, as well as published manuscripts.

Preparing a Manuscript

The rules that follow are typical requirements. Different contexts will have different requirements. Always consult your professor or publisher for specifics.

General Document Layout

Use one-inch margins, set text flush left and double-spaced with no extra lines between paragraphs, and begin each new paragraph with a first-line indent of one-half inch.

All headings and subheadings should be set at the margin, distinguished from each other by use of type size and styling (i.e., bold or italics).

Titles and headings use headline-style capitalization (Initial Capitals, not ALL CAPITALS).

Use italics where italics are meant, not underlining.

Where possible, use word-processor functions to indent paragraphs and format lists. Avoid using double spaces and extra returns, and turn off automatic hyphenation.

Illustrations & Tables

Illustrations, also called figures, include artwork or any other presentation in images rather than in text or numbers, such as maps and charts.

If more than a handful of illustrations appear in a work, the illustrations should be numbered and referred to in the text by number (e.g., as shown in figure 1). Place illustrations soon after their first text reference.

Captions usually appear below illustrations and may consist of a word or two, an incomplete sentence, a complete sentence, several sentences, or a combination.

Source information, or a credit line, is usually placed at the end of the caption.

Tables are complex lists presented in columns and rows.

Tables are numbered separately from illustrations (figure 1, table 1, figure 2, table 2, etc.).

Every table should be cited in the text by number (e.g., the last column of table 3 shows… or see table 6). Place tables soon after their first text reference.

Column heads should be as brief as possible to minimize clutter; abbreviations and symbols are allowed.

Notes to tables are numbered separately from notes for the larger manuscript and appear just below the table. Source information is listed in an unnumbered note before any other notes to the table.

Copyright & Fair Use

Copyright is a complex legal area, as are the permissions that must be obtained to reuse parts of previous works in a published book or article.

Most academic uses of other works are likely to fall under the fair-use doctrine. Fair use allows small excerpts from other copyrighted works to be used for the purposes of criticism, analysis, or evidence.

Paraphrasing does not escape copyright law.