This week I want to tell you about something that you would never think would aid you as a writer, but now I can’t imagine writing or editing the work of others without it. Style sheets.
What is a style sheet? Well, if you work for a publisher or a company that produces a lot of written work, you’ll know that a lot of companies have their own style sheet. These are company-wide rules of grammar (Oxford comma or no?), punctuation (British style or American?) and capitalization (the President went for a walk or the president went for a walk).
Yes, there are wonderful publications like the Chicago Manual of Style, the MLA, and Strunk and White which will answer many, if not all, questions concerning grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. But each author has their own quirks. Do you put spaces between the periods in an ellipses? And what do you do if you’re a writer of fantasy? Is realm knight capitalized or not? What about sorcerer or elf? If you write science fiction, you’ve got the same problem.
For an editor, it’s important to have a style sheet for each work by an author and probably also one for the author’s work generally. (The first you can share with the author, the second is just for the editor.)
So what do these style sheets include?
First a section of grammar rules the author follows—Oxford comma, etc. Probably also included are the rules of the world—what is capitalized and what isn’t.
The second section is a list of the places mentioned in the specific work. And third is a list of all of the characters mentioned. This is incredibly useful for authors as it gives them all the information they need if they’re compiling a bible.
My editor recently added a section after the list of characters which is a few favorite quotes from the book. Also amazingly helpful for advertising!
And then there is the scene table which includes the day when a scene occurs (so that you can be sure thing happen in the right order and the right time—just how long does it take to travel from London to Paris and have those days been accounted for in the manuscript?), where the scene takes place, a quick bullet point list or short paragraph of what happens in the scene, and whose POV it’s in, if there is more than one in the book. I, and some other editors, also like to include which chapter the scene is in and how many words long the scene is. These make it easy to find scenes later if you have to go back and make corrections, or make the scene longer or shorter.
For the editor to keep to themselves, they probably want a list of the mistakes a particular author commonly makes—do they forget and put a period at the end of dialogue that has a tag after it (“I can’t believe he said that.” she said. – that period should be a comma but it’s a common mistake). Perhaps an author tends to write run-on sentences or misplaced modifiers. If the editor reminds themselves of these mistakes, they’ll remember to look for them as they’re editing. They’ll also want to keep the rules of the world handy so they can be sure they are followed as well.
As an author, you know what mistakes you commonly make and it might be handy to have a list of them and how they should be corrected for when you go through and edit your own work before sending it to your professional editor. Likewise with capitalization—so you remember to capitalize Realm Knight, but not elf.
Style Sheets are a great tool for all authors and editors. Good luck in creating yours!