Chicago Manual of Style Q&A

Perhaps I’m not wildly off topic when I hope that everyone knows about the Chicago Manual of Style’s Online Q&A, wherein folks submit style questions and the Manual editors supply often pert answers. Sample from the site today:

Q. As an editor of regulatory documents, I routinely come across sentences in which the subject is an inanimate object but the verb denotes something only a person can do. Examples are “this document analyzes the hazards” and “the analysis considers the environmental impacts.” Does this type of thing have a name? Inappropriate anthropomorphism or personification? Is there a rule I can cite when explaining to the author why I have suggested rewording the sentence?

A. Why reword it? Documents do analyze and present and consider. They discuss and bemoan and mangle and make mockeries of things. There’s no rule that restricts writers to using the literal meanings of words. If it gets to the point where the documents are ordering in pizza, consider rewording.

Of course, there’s a lot of un-chippy advice as well. Of interest, perhaps, to Slawyers, although we have our own citation rules, are the CMS recommendations as to how to cite a couple of internet objects. For example, in “humanities style (a note [N], followed by a bibliographic entry [B]) and then in author-date style (an in-text citation [T], followed by a reference-list entry [R])”:
Web site

N: 11. Evanston Public Library Board of Trustees, “Evanston Public Library Strategic Plan, 2000–2010: A Decade of Outreach,” Evanston Public Library, http://www.epl.org/library/strategic-plan-00.html.
B: Evanston Public Library Board of Trustees. “Evanston Public Library Strategic Plan, 2000–2010: A Decade of Outreach.” Evanston Public Library. http://www.epl.org/library/strategic-plan-00.html (accessed June 1, 2005).
T: (Evanston Public Library Board of Trustees)
R: Evanston Public Library Board of Trustees. Evanston Public Library strategic plan, 2000–2010: A decade of outreach. Evanston Public Library. http://www.epl.org/library/strategic-plan-00.html.

Weblog entry or comment

N: 8. Peter Pearson, comment on “The New American Dilemma: Illegal Immigration,” The Becker-Posner Blog, comment posted March 6, 2006, http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/03/the_new_america.html#c080052 (accessed March 28, 2006).
B: Becker-Posner Blog, The. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/.
T: (Peter Pearson, The Becker-Posner Blog, comment posted March 6, 2006)
R: Becker-Posner blog, The. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/.

There’s more available online in this regard.