Personal communication in CMS

tnemeth

There is an issue with citing letters in the Chicago Note style.

One would want the following:
"author" to "recipient", "date"

This is fine, as long as there is no title in the entry. Once a title is in the entry, one gets:

"author" to "recipient", "title"

The date is missing here and I don't see a good reason for its omission. I would rather expect:

"author" to "recipient", "title", "date"

Any views on that? Anybody who could address it?

adamsmith

I'm not sure why you would expect the date in the note when a title is given? For all other item types the date is not given in the short form of the note.

The CMoS, as far as I can see (14.240) doesn't have any examples of short notes for letters with title, so we're left to guess and the manual doesn't seem to care much either way. If we think of convenience to the reader (and that's the CMoS main stated standard here), I would imagine a letter that has a title would be much more readily recognizable by that title than by its date - most letters, though, don't have titles.

tnemeth

I interpreted the subject of my letters as falling into the 'title' category - similarly I would also see email subjects as falling into this, or am I wrong there? To me, the dates of correspondence are at least as important as titles (or subjects in my case) - imagine a series of letters with the same subject, written at different points in time.

adamsmith

This is really outside of what can be done precisely with ref management software, as it's more of a judgment call than a rule.
E-mails are not supposed to be cited as literature in CMoS at all (http://www.chicagomanualofstyle/tools_citationguide.html

E-mail or text message

E-mail and text messages may be cited in running text (“In a text message to the author on March 1, 2010, John Doe revealed . . .”) instead of in a note, and they are rarely listed in a bibliography. The following example shows the more formal version of a note.

1. John Doe, e-mail message to author, February 28, 2010.

As for letters - no, the subject of the letter is not the title. By default, letters should not have a title, unless they are known under that title - I'm sure there are examples of that, but they are rare.

What can (probably should) be done is to add dates where they are necessary for disambiguation, i.e. where authors and titles are the same.

tnemeth

Alright, thanks for your feedback!