In addition to following the preferences of a style guide such as CMOS, CP or APA (or a dozen others), it is professional practice to build a style sheet for each client or publisher, sometimes even for individual projects.
What Is a Style Sheet?
A style sheet is a kind of crib note that specifies the spelling, grammar, word choices, and formatting preferences for a project. It usually refers to a bigger style manual such as CMOS, CP, or APA, and specifies the preferences from within and exceptions to those guides. Style sheets are “living documents” and whoever uses one may add to it both for their own reference and to inform editors who use it in later stages of the production process. In some rare cases, style sheet decisions will be changed and that deviation will be noted on the sheet for others working on the project.
Big-picture style
At the big-picture level, the style sheet notes:
- which dictionary to follow
- what the overall tone is
- the target reading level
- preferred punctuation and capitalization patterns
- the preferred language of the brand, series, author, audience, etc.
For in-house productions, a style sheet might also prescribe the colours, fonts, and “vibe” of materials that are output. It can expand to meet the needs of the team!
Minutiae of style
At the granular level, the style sheet specifies:
- correct spellings of names and places
- preferred spellings of anything there is an option for (e.g., fetus or foetus)
- treatment of numbers (when spelled out vs digits)
- significant dates or other details (especially fictitious ones)
- how dates should be given
- how ranges are treated
- whether periods are used in abbreviations and acronyms
- and so forth
Format for the sheet
The simplest or smallest one-off project might have a style sheet scribbled on the back of an envelope while a fully fleshed out one for a world-building novel would include timelines and character descriptions, as Amy Schneider details in her official Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction. Style sheets might be arranged purely alphabetically, with the entre for “Peter Parker” nestled right between “serial commas” and “percentage point”, or they might be thematic, with punctuation points grouped separately from a list of names, and seprate from the preferred spellings word list.
Learn how to start your own style sheet in this earlier post and even how to set a style for your whole organization.
Why Use a Style Sheet
Whether a style sheet is started by the developmental editor, author, or anyone else along the production path, these “crib notes” help keep track of decisions and preferences to make it faster and more reliable to make content consistent across a brand, publisher, or series — or even within a single publication. It also speeds communication and saves costs when shared with others further down the process, right on down to the proofreader.
What Are the Standards?
Creating and maintaining a style sheet is considered a professional standard of practice around the world. Whether or not one is provided to the client/manager is negotiable as it is legally the intellectual property (IP) of the editor who creates it (sometimes even for staff editors). The professional standards that mention style sheets are
As well as laid out in the style guides that guide our profession:
Image of onions in a row (in the spirit of the French expression, “guardes tes onions” by misskursovie2013 from Pixabay
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