Chicago Manual of Style Retired Rules -- Yippeeee!!!

Posted by Cheryl Anne Gardner on
For those who worry about such things, the orphan rule has now been eliminated. If you don't know what an orphan is, it is: A page may not end with a single line from a new paragraph.

Now it may.

This is from The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition, Sneek Peeks and Retired Rules.

Personally, I never worried about orphans anyway. Widows, however, are a different story. I do try to rework those if they are not at least 3/4 of a line.

Comments

Shannon Yarbrough said…
All this talk about orphans and widows! Isn't there enough sadness in the world already!? ;-)
11:05 AM
veinglory said…
Orphans are out of style, has anyone told Madonna?
2:05 PM
Levi Montgomery said…
When I first heard the rule against these, I discovered that the "rules" seem to change a bit from source to source, most notably in which one is called an "orphan" and which one is called a "widow." So I did one any CDO control freak would do. (What's that? Never heard of CDO? It's like OCD, except the letters are all in alphabetical order. AS THEY SHOULD BE!) I checked a zillion published books. It seemed no one since the 20's had cared at all about the last line of a page, but no one allowed them at the top, so that's what I adopted.

My concern is that the flood of ebooks will kill all such concerns.

Levi
5:05 PM
Cheryl Anne Gardner said…
Too funny Shannon and Emily, and Levi, I agree. Same with hyphenated words breaking across pages, no one really cares, and most readers don't know what an orphan or a widow is to begin with. And yes, ebooks make it all irrelevant. I just like my text block to be even on both pages. So I strive for that. If I have an orphan, I don't worry about it, if I have a widow, I just try to make sure it's at least 3/4 of a full line.
6:34 AM
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