Consistency, please.

Okay. I expect authors to be inconsistent. And I have never met an author who had a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style (hereafter CMS) on their desk. But I do expect publishing houses to be at least somewhat consistent. Especially when they are writing a style guide for their authors. And when said style guide instructs said authors to use CMS style, I expect the style guide itself to use the frickin' CMS. Jeez.



F'r instance:



CMS for parenthetical in-text citations is (author date) but they use (author, date); and it's (author date, page) but they have (author, date: page); two authors is (author and author date) and three is (author, author, and author date) but they say both two and three should be separated by "and"; and it goes on...



Bozhe moy.



As J. would say, they are bad people and God will punish them; unless they're another one of our Christian publishing house clients, in which case I guess He won't. (There being nothing in Leviticus about parenthetical in-text citations. Not that I noticed, anyway.)