Chicago 18 (Author-Date) Personal Communication Citation Generator

Citing a personal communication (private correspondence (email, letter, or memo)) under the Chicago Manual of Style (Author-Date System) framework requires combining Chicago Manual of Style (author-date)'s punctuation hierarchy with the specific metadata of the source. To construct a compliant entry, researchers must collect the sender/communicator name, exact date of the communication, recipient name, and medium (e.g., personal communication, email, or archival letter). In the body of your paper, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) utilizes parenthetical author-year citations with no comma between the author and year, e.g., (Author Year, page), which links directly to an entry organized in alphabetical by author family name and chronological by publication year.

When formatting a personal communication in Chicago Manual of Style (author-date), pay close attention to contributor names and capitalization. Specifically, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) enforces inverting only the first author name (Last, First) while writing subsequent co-authors in normal order (First Last) connected by the word "and", and applies headline-style Title Case for all titles, placing analytical works in quotation marks and standalone containers in italics. Chicago Author-Date places the year immediately after the author without parentheses in the reference list, and spells out first names rather than reducing them to initials. Furthermore, if your personal communication does not display an individual creator, the rule is straightforward: always identify the sender of the correspondence by their initials and surname.

For digital and online personal communication references, Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) stipulates placing the DOI (https://doi.org/...) or stable URL at the very end of the entry, requiring an access date only when no publication date exists. If the letter is housed in a public historical archive, cite it as an archival document in your bibliography rather than a private communication. Using the client-side Chicago Manual of Style (author-date) Personal Communication generator below, you can automatically parse URLs, DOIs, or ISBNs and apply these exact Citation Style Language (CSL) rules locally in your browser with zero server tracking.