A chalkboard during a talk on probability.
It’s an exciting time for my family!
As most of you know, my husband will be graduating with his PhD in math in May from Purdue University, and he’s recently accepted an offer to be a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia. (We were making this decision right around February 1, when I should have sent out this month’s Strike-Through.)
I don’t understand the math research that Daniel does—if you want a quick summary of his research, it’s here—but I can weigh in on why the degree he’s getting should be formatted as “PhD” and not “Ph.D.,” and why he’s going to be a “postdoc” and not a “post-doc.” If you have no idea what a postdoc does, this article helps to explain the basics.
I’ll insert my usual disclaimer that “Ph.D.” isn’t wrong in the sense that any rules of grammar are violated by using it. After all, The AP Stylebook says the abbreviation for “doctor of philosophy” should include periods. This means that, according to AP, the plural for “Ph.D.” is the somewhat strange-looking “Ph.D.s”!
The Chicago Manual of Style, however, advises writing “PhD.” They say that abbreviations that end on a lowercase letter (such as “Dr.” and “a.m.”) should have periods, and abbreviations with two or more capital letters should not include periods, even if they have a lowercase letter in them, as “PhD” does (10.4).
One of the key principles of Chicago style is to avoid over-formatting. If an abbreviation consists of lowercase letters or ends with a lowercase letter, it might be confusing if it didn’t have periods. For instance, “a.m.” would become “am.”’
For abbreviations that contain only capital letters or mostly capital letters, the capitalization already adds clarity. No additional punctuation is necessary.
So, once Daniel passes his dissertation defense in April, he will be Dr. Slonim, but he will have a PhD.
The same principle carries over into why “postdoc” doesn’t have a hyphen:
“In general, Chicago prefers a spare hyphenation style: if no suitable example or analogy can be found [either in CMS] or in the dictionary, hyphens should be added only if doing so will prevent a misreading or otherwise significantly aid comprehension” (7.89).
As you probably know, the “post” in “postdoc” is a prefix, a word that doesn’t act as a stand-alone word but is instead affixed to the beginning of another word, usually to create a narrower range of meaning. (Other common prefixes are “pre,” “co,” “micro,” etc.) Compounds formed with prefixes usually don’t have hyphens, except in a handful of circumstances I’ll discuss next time. For now, err on the side of not using hyphens for words like “postdoc” that start with common prefixes. You can always check Merriam-Webster to see if they include a hyphen in any given word.
Mixing the heavy dough of English, while my husband beats through the thicket of academia,
Rebekah Slonim
A slide from one of my husband’s research talks.