What a boring topic for an article. Well, they can’t all be bangers. Or can they? For some reason, whenever I think I am writing a boring article it turns out to be more-viewed and better-liked than the articles I think will be super interesting. Style sheets are funner than you think, anyway. I always enjoy making a project style sheet. Who wouldn’t want to make a style sheet? Who among us does not want to be organizing everything, incessantly, at all times? Let them style the first sheet.
I haven’t talked about style in a long time, I think since this 2020 article on the various style manuals on the market. In the time since then a new edition of Scientific Style and Format was written and I served as a peer reviewer for parts of the new edition. Also during this time, I was headhunted for a job by an organization that puts out one of the biggest and most widely used style manuals in the United States. (I did not accept.) I am telling you this so you know, retroactively, that I know my style stuff.
I’m actually style-conscious in many ways but we’re just talking about manuscript style here and now.
Today I am inducting you into secrets of the editor’s greatest weapon. No surprises: It’s the project style sheet, just like I said in the title. A style sheet has a lot of utility throughout the lifecycle of your manuscript, from when you start drafting (yes, even then!), revising, editing, reviewing copyedits, and checking your proofs. Most authors probably are not making a style sheet as they go—or, at least, not a formal one. Some of you may have intuitively picked up on the idea and set aside a separate document or notepad to jot down your style choices like how to spell character names, place names, and so on.
I’ll go over how to create a style sheet and how to use it, and I’ll even include a downloadable template for you to use for your own style sheets in the future. But first, I want to reiterate the cardinal rule of drafting, which is:
Don’t edit while you draft.
I’m serious, don’t do that! Okay, you can do it a little bit. When I sit down to work on drafting a manuscript, I usually spend the first couple of minutes reading over and editing the last several paragraphs I wrote before I ended my last session—but that’s it! That’s all I allow myself. Drafting is a time for spewing word vomit onto the page and letting it be terrible. Celebrate the terribleness. Roll around in it. Do not try to remove or otherwise alleviate the terribleness until you are done drafting.
However: Cobbling together the rudiments of a style sheet as you go:
Is not editing; and further,
Can save time in the drafting phase.
While we draft we make choices. We choose what to name characters, we choose how to spell those names, we choose whether certain terms get capitalized, we make all kinds of style decisions. You’re probably not going to forget how to spell your main character’s name but if you’re drafting along and you throw in a minor character and dash off a name for them and then 10,000 words later you need to reference them again, it’s handy to have the spelling noted on your style sheet so you don’t have to go back through your document like, “Dang, was it Elise or Elisa?”
I just wanted to get that out of the way. It does not hurt to make style notes while you’re drafting as long as you don’t use that as an opportunity to procrastinate by going back and editing for style every time you put something new on the style sheet, like “I just decided to capitalize types of magic—like Necromancy instead of necromancy—so now I will stop drafting and go back through my manuscript looking for every mention of every type of magic to capitalize it before I move on with the draft.” Do not do that. That is probably the worst thing you can do.
While drafting, do add style decisions to the sheet as you go but do not stop drafting to edit based on the decisions you make. Simple.
What is a style sheet, exactly? A style sheet is a collaborative document that collects the style decisions made for a specific manuscript (or series) that are additional to, or in contradiction of, the prevailing style manual in use for that manuscript. At least, that is my understanding of what a style sheet is.
If I am editing a manuscript for a publishing company that uses Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) as their prevailing manual, that does not mean that all style decisions in every manuscript published by that company are going to adhere to CMS. For one thing, there may be aspects of the manuscript that are better governed by a different manual. Consider: The memoir of an emergency room physician. This would probably follow Chicago mainly, but might defer to American Medical Association (AMA) style for medical terminology.
For another, there may be aspects specific to this manuscript where the author or editor prefers to deviate from CMS. For instance, CMS would like centuries to be written as “the 1800s,” “the 1990s,” but a publisher or author may prefer constructions like “the eighteen hundreds,” “the nineteenth century,” “the nineties,” and so on.
And for another, there may be aspects specific to this manuscript that aren’t covered in CMS. Returning to the example above, if you have a system of magic with multiple types and you have to decide whether those types or families of magic are going to be capitalized when referenced, you’re on your own. I’m pretty sure CMS does not have guidance on this because types of magic aren’t a real thing. (I could be wrong, maybe it’s buried somewhere in those 1100+ pages.)
And finally, many publishing companies and imprints have their own house style guide that specifies where they would like manuscripts to deviate from their prevailing style manual always. That is, let’s say Book Publisher, Ltd, uses CMS as their main style manual, but also uses AMA for medical terminology. However, they do not use the reference style from either CMS or AMA; they have their own bespoke reference style. That reference style is something that would appear in the company’s house style guide.
At some point during the editing of a manuscript (if this has not already been done), someone—usually the copyeditor—will begin a style sheet to start enforcing consistency on the manuscript. This person will note which manual (or manuals) they’re following; then they’ll outline the specific style decisions enforced that are either selected from multiple options in that manual, or are different than proscribed by the manual; then they’ll make a list of specific words and terms to specify exactly how spelling, capitalization, diacritical marks, and so on, should be handled.
For example: Let’s say the author has used scare quotes around terms after using the phrase so-called about half the time (eg, “so-called ‘dogs’”) and not used them the other half of the time (eg, “so-called dogs”). The copyeditor, will make a decision based on what’s in the style manual and the house style guide, make a note of it on the style sheet, and then make sure that decision is enforced consistently throughout the manuscript. Since CMS indicates that scare quotes should not be included when using the phrase so-called, then the copyeditor would remove the scare quotes from the instances that have them rather than adding scare quotes to the instances that don’t have them.
Let’s say you’re the author of this book and you actually love scare quotes. I mean, I hope you don’t, because scare quotes are horrible. But let’s say you love them and on this hill you wish to die. If you made that decision, early on in drafting, that you were going to place scare quotes around terms following so-called, you could note that conscious style decision on your basic style sheet for two purposes: First, to remind yourself to always use scare quotes in that situation while you’re writing (less important); and second, to let the editors who come later know that you did this on purpose and prefer to keep your scare quotes (more important). You might not win that style battle but you made your wishes known.
If the author of the book hasn’t started a style sheet like this, the copyeditor will usually be the one to start the sheet. But I mentioned above that a style sheet is a collaborative document. A lot of people use it during the course of editing a manuscript, and a lot of people add to it during the course of editing a manuscript.
After the copyeditor has finished their edits, the manuscript is likely to go back to the author to review those edits before page composition. (This doesn’t happen in every production workflow; but it’s usual.) This is when you get your manuscript back with all those mood-sinking redlines. If the copyeditor prepared a style sheet, that should be circulated to the author along with those edits for review. This way, when the author is reviewing the edits, they can also consult the style sheet to understand why certain changes were made, and also to see for themself that these changes were made consistently.
During this stage—reviewing the edits—the author might want to make some additions or changes to the style sheet. Maybe the copyeditor has on their word list “necromancy” and the author intended that types of magic would be capitalized. The author, coming across the first instance of “Necromancy” changed to “necromancy” in the manuscript, would indicate that this change should be “stet t/o”—that’s editorial shorthand for “let it stand as set throughout,” that is, “do not make this editorial change here or anywhere else.” The author might then also update the style sheet’s wordlist so that “necromancy” is styled “Necromancy”—and if not, then upon return of the manuscript to the copyeditor for cleanup, the copyeditor would make this update to the style sheet.
Why are we still updating the style sheet? Because we’re going to use it some more. Depending on who is composing (typesetting) the manuscript, and what is included in the style sheet, the style sheet may next go to the compositor to use as a reference for preparing the proofs.
The stylesheet could include typecodes (this is rare these days) that indicate where specific elements should be inserted (for instance, “@cn:1” to indicate “this numeral 1 is the chapter number, set it using the chapter number style” or “@ct:The Old Sea-Dog at the ‘Admiral Benbow’” to indicate “set this text as the chapter title”).
More important, if there are characters used in the text that have a tendency to drop out when the text is converted from Word to XML and then imported into the composition software—like any glyph with a diacritic wants to do—then the style sheet can help the compositor make sure those all come into the proofs correctly. If your manuscript references “José Canseco” and you specify that on the style sheet, for example, a careful compositor can check and make sure all of the és came in correctly so your proof doesn’t say “Jos Canseco” fifty times.
After the edits are approved by the author and incorporated, and the pages composed, then the proofreader, too, uses the style sheet to make sure there are no inconsistencies left in the manuscript. The author, reviewing their proofs again (for the last time we hope), can use that style sheet again, as well, to make sure they’re not changing things willy-nilly contrary to style.
How do you make a style sheet? Open a fresh document in whatever word processor you use and save it with a title that distinctly refers to the manuscript, such as “Melville-Moby-Dick-SS.” I usually put a heading at the top of the document indicating the author’s name, manuscript title, my name as the person who prepared the style sheet, and the date I completed work on it. Then I add four subheads: General Style, Number Style, Reference Style, and Words. If you’re writing fiction, number style and reference style will be less important to you and the word section will probably be your bread and butter.
Then, I keep that document handy and every time I make a decision about how something is styled, spelled, accented, capitalized, or otherwise presented, I note it in the correct section. Is it going to be “antigovernment” or “anti-government”? Am I using “United States” as the noun and “U.S.” as the adjectival form, or am I going to use “American” as the adjectival? Is this character’s name spelled “Lysander” or “Lysandre”? If I make a bullet list, am I capitalizing the first word of each bullet item? Am I ending each bullet item with punctuation or not? Am I enforcing correct use of “that” and “which,” or am I using them interchangeably? If I have references, how are they styled? How will a reference to a book chapter look different than a reference to a journal article?
I’ve created a style sheet template in Google docs that you can download and use however you like. It’s generic, but I included some general, number, and reference styles, plus some words, to get you started thinking about what you’d put on your own style sheet. If your word list starts to run long (if you’re writing an epic or something with a lot of specialized terminology), think about inserting a two-column, multi-row table and placing each letter group in its own cell to make it easier to navigate the long list.
That’s it, that’s all you need to get yourself to the style races. Or, as Ric Flair would say, stylin and profilin. You actually want to be stylin but not profilin, as in, having a high profile. The thing about editing is, if it’s done well, no one will notice it at all.
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