Style Sheets

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?