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From the Chicago Manual of Style, some interesting answers to interesting questions!

Q. Hello! In the examples in CMOS 8.48, can you clarify why Southern California, Northern California, West Tennessee, East Tennessee, and Middle Tennessee get capitalized, whereas western Arizona, eastern Massachusetts, southern Minnesota, northwest Illinois, and central Illinois do not?

A. Southern California and Northern California are capitalized because they have become recognized beyond their borders as the names of two geographic and cultural entities. East, West, and Middle Tennessee are capitalized as the names of the three “grand divisions” in that state, a usage that has become widely accepted; see, among other sources, the entry for “Tennessee” in Britannica. (Many sources style these as the Grand Divisions—with initial capitals—including this page from the Tennessee Historical Society. Tennessee’s state constitution, on the other hand, uses lowercase, and it doesn’t name the three divisions.)

As for the other examples in your question, each of those is more likely to be used generically (i.e., to refer to the western or other portion of a state) rather than as a proper noun. And though any of them might be capitalized in local usage (as in a travel guide extolling the virtues of a certain region), such usage shouldn’t necessarily determine your own (or that of your author). When in doubt, use lowercase for terms like western at the state level and caps for national or global regions.

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Q. Would you use a comma after the verb read in fiction when written text is introduced by that word? Does it matter whether the text is presented as a sentence? For example,

The sign read Keep Out.

versus

The sign read, “Thank you for not smoking.”

As a copyeditor I am always unsure whether read is considered a variation of such terms as said, replied, asked, wrote, or the like. Perhaps I must consider whether the grammar and syntax of the quoted material is separate from the text that introduces it?

A. You don’t normally need a comma before words introduced by the verb read—or said, for that matter—used in the sense of “consisted of (or included) the word(s).” And though quotation marks are helpful in some cases, they can usually be omitted in favor of title case for shorter signs (see CMOS 7.64):

The sign read “Thank you for not smoking.”

or

The sign read Thank You for Not Smoking.

Use a comma only in the rare event that read is used as a speech tag (in which case the quoted words would be considered to be syntactically independent relative to the surrounding sentence; see CMOS 12.14):

I asked, “Could you tell me what that sign says?”

Squinting through the haze, she read, “ ‘Thank you for not smoking.’ ”

Note the nested single quotation marks, which clarify that the quoted speaker is quoting something in turn (see also CMOS 12.46 and 6.11).