CMS Style Quick Reference

Chicago-Turabian Style Quick Reference
Style guides are mostly designed to be read and studied. They are reference works, so this is as it should be. But if you are simply trying draft a paper in CMS style, learning how to use the style is about as much fun as reading the phone book. The CMS Quick Reference takes a different approach.

The Chicago Manual of Style (2003) has NO sample pages showing how a class paper should be formatted, the Turabian Manual (2007) has just ONE, and that's the no-brainer title page! You get to search for bits and pieces of information here and there to figure out how to present your paper. The Quick Reference starts from the opposite perspective. It shows how the various pages--title page, first text page, text page with a table and figure, and bibliography--should look. Click on a feature for a pop-up note explaining the details (screen shot).

Style sheets with pop-up notes show how to format reference sources in classic Chicago footnote style, as well as the classic Chicago bibliography style. All the essential information you need to present a paper in exacting Chicago style is available for quick reference .

Windows? The original Microsoft Help system produces hypertext documents, much like Web pages. It has the added virtue of enabling very precise formatting, something the current systems do only with great difficulty. The Chicago-Turabian Quick Reference uses this system. It works with a reader that is already installed on Windows PCs.

Download, unzip, install: CMS Quick Reference (ZIP 560KB).

CMS Guide Home Page

The CMS Quick Reference compliments the new Turabian Manual. The Manual has entire parts on documenting sources (5 chapters!) and well as the more basic elements of style--punctuation, spelling, numbers, quotations, and special terms and titles (7 chapters). Amazon ships free (with no sales tax) on orders over $25. At $11.56, the Turabian Manual is a great buy.

amazon.com

University of Chicago Press. 2003. Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. Retail $55.00. Link to Amazon.com: (Hardcover $38.50).

Refreshingly revised, in active voice. The new edition surpasses the last in clarity and organization, so much so that you will gratefully relegate the old edition to its now proper role as a door stop. Chicago has solved the problem of citing electronic sources by adding a URL to the format of an equivalent print document. You may even dispense with an access date. CMS no longer reads like instructions for programming a VCR, or like a book cobbled together by a committee. The style is clear, concise, and direct throughout.

amazon.com

Turabian, Kate L. 2007. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 7th ed.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Link to Amazon.com: (New Edition $11.56 April 2007).

The Chicago Manual of Style website advises the "CMS is primarily a reference for manuscripts that will be published as books. For a master's thesis [and similar papers], you would find Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers . . . much more useful." At the heart of a research style is documentation—how to format notes and references. Most of the essential features of Chicago style are covered in this manual, though page formatting for class projects is missing. New with this edition is a guide to writing research papers, as well as the guide to documentation and style.

Fall 2007