Apostrophe Catastrophe
Fill in the Blank: CMOS
Redline That Bias
Parts of Copyediting
100
the possessive of it
What is its?
100
"______—the headings at the tops of pages—function like page numbers, as signposts. Especially useful in scholarly books and textbooks, they are sometimes omitted for practical reasons. . . . _____ are sometimes placed at the bottom of the page."
What are running heads?
100
"... black and brown Americans."
Who are "Black and Brown Americans"?
100
The initial review of a final manuscript by the in-house project editor.
What is precopyedit analysis?
200
the possessive of Pope Francis
What is Pope Francis's?
200
"In nontechnical formats, Chicago advises spelling out whole numbers ____ through _____ and certain round multiples of those numbers."
What are zero through one hundred?
200
"A chairman is the presiding officer of a meeting, organization, committee, or event."
What is "A chair is the presiding officer of a meeting, organization, committee, or event."
Same goes for fireman, mailman, businessman, congressman, policeman. Always better to avoid "man": firefighter, mail carrier, business executive, congressional representative, police officer.
200
When an author reviews their copy editors markup.
What is author redlining?
300
the possessive of United States
What is United States'?
300
"As long as a ______ style is maintained within any one work, logical and defensible variations on the style illustrated in [Chicago Manual of Style] are acceptable if agreed to by author and publisher."
What is consistent?
300
"The author is usually the best judge of his or her reader."
What is "Authors are usually the best judges of their readers" or "The author is usually the best judge of their readers."
300
When the copy editor incorporates the author's responses to their initial edit into the final manuscript.
What is clean up?
400
A period would go here in the following sentence: The last car in the lot was the Smiths'
What is after the apostrophe?
400
"In deciding whether to run in or set off a quotation, _____ is usually the deciding factor."
What is length?
400
What is, "Simone Manuel and Michael Phelps share a historic night."
400
A list of special punctuation, unusual diacritics, or other editorial items that deviate from CMOS and house style. This list includes any special words and terms capitalized, italicized, hyphenated, spelled, or otherwise treated in any way unique to the manuscript.
What is an editor's style sheet?
500
An apostrophe has these three uses.
What are to indicate possessive cases, stand in for missing letters (in contractions, for example), and to form the plural of lowercase letters.
500
"_________ are capitalized when they immediately precede a personal name and are thus used as part of the name. . . In formal prose and other generic texxt, _____ are normally lowercased when following a name."
What are civil, military, religious, and professional titles?
500
What is "Houston Dash trade Kaelia Ohai Watt to Chicago."
500
How a copy editor communicates the nature and scope of their editing to the author, and gives instructions for how to reply to the edits.
What is a cover letter?