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Tuesday, 10 December 2013

How to Keep Track of Your Elements of Style*

by Carla Douglas
@CarlaJDouglas
Image by Mike Licht (CC BY 2.0)
Do you use a style sheet to keep track of details as you’re writing? Almost any writing project will benefit if you do — books, essays, instruction manuals, even blogs.

A style sheet is the organizational tool copyeditors use to record specific details about a piece of writing — things like spelling, capitalization and hyphenation — in order to make sure that these features appear the same way throughout. Basically, it’s a list of decisions you make about how you want the text to appear when it’s finished.

For example, in the paragraph above, I’ve written copyeditors. It would also be correct to write copy-editors or copy editors. By recording my decision, I’m telling others — an editor, for instance — that this is the format I’ve chosen. Keeping track of these details is an important step in ensuring that the finished product will be uniform and consistent.

An easy way to make decisions about capitalization and spelling is to choose a default dictionary — usually one that’s considered authoritative, such as Merriam-Webster’s, the Oxford English Dictionary or the Canadian Oxford. At the same time, because your style sheet is customized to your project, if you have a spelling preference that isn’t in line with your chosen dictionary, you can simply specify this difference on your style sheet. For instance, if you prefer skeptic over sceptic, or vice-versa, just state this preference on the style sheet.
  
You can track any of your preferences on a style sheet. Typically, it addresses
  • which dictionary is referenced
  • how dates and numbers should appear (10 Dec 2013 or December 10, 2013?)
  • spelling, including British/American differences and how names and places should be spelled throughout (Jon or John?)
  • how specific words should be hyphenated
  • how to handle possessives (Douglas’s or Douglas’?)
  • how references and citations should appear

Below is a sample style sheet. It doesn’t have to be complex, but yours should include all the elements that could correctly be written more than one way and could thus cause confusion. Also include the names of characters and places, street names, etc., that could be misspelled or that have alternative spellings.
  
Click to enlarge

If a style sheet is a tool for editors, why should writers use one?

Short answer? You want to be taken seriously. Even if you hire a copyeditor to polish your book — and especially if you don’t — you want to provide as few opportunities as possible for readers to trip. Readers perceive inconsistencies as errors, and the more of these they encounter, the more likely they are to question your trustworthiness as a storyteller or an authority on a subject.

Most of all, using a style sheet helps you to stay organized. Any piece of writing can generate an unwieldy mass of ideas and information. Recording stylistic preferences gives you a tool both to tame some of this information and to retain control of your writing.


*The real Elements of Style, of course, is the renowned guide to writing style by William Strunk (and later, E.B. White). The Elements of Style does not really refer to the same elements you’d include on a style sheet. Rather, Strunk and White (as it’s often called) is more a guide to writing style and usage, and it has recently fallen out of favour for being prescriptivist and even bossy. For many people, however, it is a sentimental favourite and a classic, too. Case in point: The Elements of Style has been re-issued as an illustrated volume and adapted and performed at the NY Public Library as a cantata (take that, Chicago Manual of Style!). Of even more interest to contemporary readers and writers, William Strunk was a self-pub! It’s true — find the details in the introduction to the 3rd edition (maybe other editions, too) or in the Wikipedia article in the above link.

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