Chicago Manual of Style's 17th edition

The Seventeenth Edition of The Chicago Manual of Style arrived in the mail yesterday. There are many changes to update this edition from 2010’s sixteenth edition. Some noteworthy changes:

• guidance on using they as a gender-neutral way to refer to a specific person (5.48)
• removed the hyphen from email (7.89)
  
• internet, no capital I (7.80)
• guidance on PDF annotations  (2.119)
• guidance on nonbreaking and other types of spaces (6.119)
• new examples of currency showing Chinese currency and bitcoin (9.23)
• sanctions US as a noun (10.32)
• coverage of metadata and keywords (throughout, see 1.75, 1.93, 1.111, 1.120)
• added guidance for self-published authors and how they can benefit from following procedures once only followed by traditional publishers (throughout, especially chs. 1–4)

The Chicago Manual of Style is my default style guide. But I don't apply it uniformly. I turn to The Bluebook for legal citation, Typography for Lawyers for typographical guidance, Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, Garner's Modern American Usage, Garner's Dictionary of Legal Usage, Black's Law Dictionary, and the now-old New York Times Manual of Style and Usage for usage guidance. I use periods in abbreviations much closer to the style of the New York Times as shown in its style guide as well as its current publications and will likely continue to follow that style of punctuation as long as publications like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times use it. The general rule is that when you pronounce the letters (E.P.A.), separate them by periods. If you pronounce them like a word (NASA), use no periods. But that can be superseded by the entity's own usage.

I have been heartened by the Chicago Manual of Style's guidance on Internet and e-mail, particularly the former (there is only one, so it should be a proper noun), as opposed to the A.P. and others. So I was a bit disappointed to see them changed. I'll continue to keep an eye on these two, but I'll be sticking with the capitalized and hyphenated forms of these two terms until at least Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionary makes these changes. I was glad to see that the new edition doesn't change its recommendation to keep the accent marks in résumé.