The Chicago Manual of Style

So why...

yeah so you know just being the truth but from a freelancer perspective I've really valued just how everything is framed I just got myself a brand new Canadian Oxford English Dictionary in Chicago physical copy of the Chicago Manual of Style because there is oh my god the English language is just such

That's so

fun.

Also, the client will come to you and they'll have a language convention.

If it's American English, you have to prove American talent.

and the Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition is like the most current update edition.

Fun fact, listeners, the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary has been updated in over a decade and a half.

The Oxford English Dictionary began incorporating acronyms in its nineteenth-century editions, but it wasn't until the late twentieth century that they started treating them as entries on par with other words.

Style guides like Chicago and AP had to update their rules to accommodate initialisms and pronounceable acronyms.

But not all acronyms are equal.

There's a long-standing debate among linguists about whether something pronounced letter by letter should be called an acronym or an initialism.

The nineteenth century saw punctuation become more standardized.

Chicago Manual of Style and other guides started recommending when to replace commas with dashes for emphasis or clarity.

Yet writers like Mark Twain still wielded the dash in a way that felt almost anarchic, reflecting a broader cultural shift toward individual expression in print.

Those choices helped cement the dash as both a formal and informal tool, depending on context.

Professors will tell undergrads to avoid it in theses or grant proposals.

That's partly because style guides like APA and Chicago still list it as a potentially awkward construction.

So the rule lives on as a kind of etiquette marker.

But if you look at actual journal articles, you'll see preposition stranding pop up all over the place, especially in relative clauses like "the study that we conducted." It's almost impossible to rewrite those without sounding stiff.