Style guides and the copyeditor

Shiny new copyeditors often ask what they’re meant to do with a style guide, and can get them muddled up with style sheets.

So I’m going to take a closer look at style guides, how copyeditors use them and how they’re different from a style sheet. (I’ve written before about style sheets, suggesting authors might send them to their editor, and what authors need to do when their editor compiles and sends one to them.)

Style guides

A style guide is exactly what it says – for once publishing language is clear and straightforward! It’s a guide to the style to be used in the text. There are plenty of published guides – the big hitters are New Hart’s Rules in the UK and the Chicago Manual of Style in the US, but they are far, far from the only ones. Wikipedia (yes, I know) lists a selection of the more common ones applicable to English but just about every publisher has their own, every journal (or every journal publisher), every newspaper, every magazine, every organisation (or it should!) and every government (ditto).

Different academic disciplines also have preferred styles, so a science paper looks very different from a humanities one when, for instance, it comes to referencing. Those preferred styles are pretty high level, so still, when it comes down to preparing a manuscript for publication, a specific style guide will be essential.

Style guides describe the preferences of the outfit responsible for publishing the text – and they cover spelling, punctuation, spacing, the appearance of tables, numbers (lots about numbers), legal terms, technical terms, medical terms, scientific terms more broadly, the use of italics, how every element in the text should read and, for some features, look on the page.

A well-written style guide is golden for copyeditors!

We know whether we’re using ‑ize or ‑ise spellings, which numbers always appear as digits and which are spelled out, whether tables have all their gridlines, or just some, whether italic is used for emphasis or just for foreign words, titles and the names of ships, whether every paragraph is full out (not indented), or just the one after a heading or displayed quotation, how long a quotation must be to be displayed (set apart from the main text so it’s easily distinguishable on the page – and in what manner the quotation is set apart from the main text – spacing, indents, change of font size…), what the approach to hyphens and capitalisation is to be, whether serial commas are used, how in-text citations are ordered and punctuated…

Rules are rules – sometimes

There’s a general feeling that US editors are more likely to think in terms of ‘rules’ than UK editors. I couldn’t possibly comment! But it’s fair to say that some editors, no matter where they hail from, are more prone to thinking in terms of ‘rules’ than others.

But English has precious few rules.

Even ‘rules’ around syntax, the slowest to change, can be bent for artistic purposes, say in poetry or dialogue (looking at you, Yoda!).

My heart sinks when I see on social media an editor or a proofreader asking what the ‘rule’ is for something – hyphenating adverbs, maybe. Let’s head off on a tangent and take a quick look at that.

The general principle these days is not to hyphenate adverbs ending in ‑ly. It’s not needed – adverbs modify a verb and there’s only one verb in the vicinity. But not all adverbs end in ‑ly (aka flat adverbs, as in ‘stand still’. Who says ‘stand stilly’?). And not all words that end in ‑ly are adverbs (lonely, silly, early…)! And some adverbs may, linked to another word, form an adjective (e.g. freely circulating air – some of you will be itching to hyphenate freely with circulating!). So you can see that someone may start to doubt what they know about The Rule that adverbs ending in ‑ly aren’t ever hyphenated.

Or maybe there’ll be a query about The Rule about unspaced em dashes or spaced en dashes. Again, no rule – just current preferences, and those will vary between territories and between publishers within territories.

There are no rules – there are conventions, and those will change over time. This is what causes people who profess to just lurve words to wail that standards are falling wherever they look – but Roman rhetoricians were making the same complaint a couple of thousand years ago, and we’re still able to communicate effectively with each other!

Well – actually ‘no rules’ is only true up to a point. Once you’re working on text that is going to be published, the style guide you’re working to becomes your rule book – for that piece of text for that client. But that set of conventions, the preferences of the publisher, are not applicable generally.

This is why I try to plan my work so I’m not flipping between text for different publishers too often – I’ll be carrying a lot of publisher A’s style guide in my head and so if I have to switch to publisher B, who uses a different style for numbers, or spellings, or quotations or… then I have to revert to looking everything up again, which slows me down and gives me a headache.

Style sheets

So – style sheets? Nope, not the same as a style guide. Because the style guide cannot possibly cover every circumstance (though the Chicago Manual of Style gives it a good go, given the current edition exceeds 1,100 pages!), copyeditors produce a style sheet for that particular piece of text.

This condenses the bits of the style guide that apply to this piece of text, and shows where the author’s preferences have taken precedence, and where the copyeditor has felt that it is right to deviate from the style guide. Yep – that’s right, we’ve gone from ‘no rules’ to ‘rules’ and swung back to ‘not as many rules as you hoped’.

Rules are nice. They absolve you from responsibility and give you certainty. It’s comfortable editing with firm rules, right up to the point that the text makes the rule a nonsense.

And some rules in style guides are very flexible. The rule may be to follow the author’s style of referencing so long as it is consistent, for instance.

Ah, consistency!

Consistency is the name of the game. Why? Because if the text flip-flops around randomly between, say, spelling numbers to ten and spelling them to ninety-nine, the reader may start to think there must be something significant about the difference and then start trying to figure out what that is, instead of thinking about what you wrote. You don’t want your reader’s attention to be on how your text has been printed, instead!

Worse, if you spell focused with one S in one place, and two Ss in the next paragraph, or sentence, even, it starts to look sloppy. And if you can’t even spell a word the same way, what else have you been sloppy about? The research?

In summary

In a nutshell, the style guide is the gold standard for producing a piece of text that suits the preferences of the publisher (a term I’m using in the widest sense). The style sheet condenses the style guide to just those bits that are applicable, then catalogues variation from the style guide, and adds the style used for things that aren’t covered in the style guide in the first place.

This gives copyeditors a yardstick for consistency and helps to ensure authors aren’t confusing or distracting their readers because of inconsistency.