New edition of Chicago Manual of Style inspires Pulitzer Prize-winning author to pragmatic (or is that Pragmatic? *) philosophizing about writing.

Our industry's three leading newsletters for writers and editors, Copy Editor, The Editorial Eye, and Writing That Works, have all weighed in with mixed but generally favorable reviews of the long-awaited 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

But--

* If you still have memories of late college nights of No-Dozfueled struggles with the correct format for your annotations and bibliography,

* If you're tired of being whipped around and waylaid by Microsoft Word's commands and warnings,

* If you're at your sixes and sevens about the p's and q's laid out by style and usage manuals--

I recommend reading The New Yorker's October 6 2003, article "The End Matter," by Louis Menand. prolific writer and author of last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Metaphysical Club. ** Here are some excerpts:

"Annotation may seem a mindless and mechanical task. In fact, it calls for both superb fine-motor skills and for adherence to the most exiguous formal demands. Throw in sleep deprivation and a mild case of caffeine jitters, and the combination is guaranteed to produce flawed page after flawed page. In the world of End Matter, there is no such thing as a flyspeck. Every error is an error of substance, a betrayal of ignorance and inexperience, the academic equivalent of the double dribble. That the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d'etre are long past reconstructing does not reduce the penalties for nonconformity. You are on page 3 of your endnotes before you remember that ibid is supposed to end with a period, since it is an abbreviation for ibidem ('in the same place'). What genius decided that it was worth saving a character by this practice no longer matters. What matters is that it is now three-thirty in the morning and you have to retype three pages of notes."

Microsoft Word

"First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of popups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you're not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

"When, in the old days, you hit the wrong key on your typewriter, you got one wrong character. Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea how you got there; you can spend the rest of the night trying to get out. In the end. you stop the random clicking and dragging and pulling-down and have recourse to the solution of every computer moron: with a sob relief, you press Ctrl/Alt/Del. (What do Control and Alt mean, by the way? Does anyone still know?) A message appears: 'You will lose any unsaved information in all programs that are running.' O.K.? Cancel? End task? End life? The whole reason for rebooting was that you didn't have access to your information, so how can you save it? You can always pull the plug out of the wall. That usually ends your 'session' (a term borrowed--no accident--from psychoanalysis."

Chicago

"Some people will complain that the new 'Chicago Manual' [That's The New Yorker's style, quote marks around book titles] is too long. These people do not understand the nature of style. There is, if not a right way, a best way to do every single thing, down to the proverbial dotting of the 'i.' Relativism is fine for the big moral questions, where we can never know for sure, but in arbitrary realms like form and usage even small doses of relativism are lethal. The 'Manual' is not too long. It is not long enough. The perfect manual of style would be like the perfect map of the world: exactly coterminous with its subject, containing a rule for every word of every sentence. We would need an extra universe to accommodate it. It would be worth it."

The New Yorker, Back Issues, P.O. Box 37864, Boone IA 50037, 800-825-2510, [e-mail]

* The authors of Chicago "have heard of structuralism and post-modernism (both lowercase) but (like Microsoft) do not recognize poststructuralism (this from one of Derrida's American publishers). Pragmatism (the philosophy) is unlisted, but it can create problems; George W. Bush is (arguably) a pragmatist, but he is no Pragmatist."

-Louis Menand

** Run that sentence--beginning with "But--" and containing three bulleted items and our own inhouse style of italic boldface for publications, plus the idiosyncratic paragraphing--by any stylebook and see what you come up with.