Chronicle Books Blog

“Language is something to be celebrated, and March 4 is the perfect day to do it,” according to Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty.

This day of editors’ glee prompted me to reflect on Chronicle’s house style. (Please, Grammar Gods, bless this post with no idiotic errors.) We have a house style guide with particulars for our cookbooks and craft books, and otherwise we defer to the Chicago Manual of Style. But the nature of the books we publish – in all their quirky glory – requires us to be flexible grammarians. We have to decide if following the rules is what’s right for the book and sometimes we take a little creative license with our language.

I give big props to our managing editorial department, the grammar guards, for upholding the language laws, keeping our books free of errors, and being willing to let a book’s character come forward, even if it’s not technically grammatically correct. Here are just a few cover examples.

The title of Craft, Inc. technically has a comma and a period. But when we reviewed cover designs, we decided that the title read more clearly without the comma after “Craft.”

Sometimes our designers get to play with punctuation for the sake of a book’s spirit. Best example ever: the blatantly lazy line break on the cover of The Underachiever’s Manifesto.

Finally, The Book of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks will make any language lover chuckle. Because, really, who wants to cook with “groceries”?

Happy National “Grammar” Day, everyone!

Yours in good grammar,

Kate Woodrow
Editor

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