My editor sent me a style sheet. What do I do with it?

When you’ve had your book copyedited, it’s probable your copyeditor has sent you the style sheet that they developed and worked to.

Why do they do that? Why would you want it? And if you don’t get it, should you ask for it? (Yes, you should.)

What’s ‘style’?

This covers spelling and punctuation conventions, how numbers and dates are treated, how references should be presented, what goes into the table of contents and illustrations list, instructions for handling abbreviations and lists, and the prescription or proscription of particular words or phrases.

This might include directions on the capitalisation of Black and White as descriptors of people; or whether to use Second World War, World War 2, World War II, WWII or WW2’; or whether ‘whilst’ and ‘amongst’ are banned in favour of ‘while’ and ‘among’; whether singular they is used; whether ‘data’ is plural or singular.

It will cover how captions look for your artwork, how tables look (lots of gridlines, few or none; bold, italics, capitalisation for headings), the sequence of sections in the front and endmatter of the book, the length and layout of author bios, the maximum number of characters for a running head and so on and so on.

Instructions regarding paper size, typefaces and fonts and so on may occasionally appear in the style guide, but more often form a separate specific for the typesetter or designer.

Another big area for style guides is how quotations are handled. There may well be a minimum number of words before a quotation will be displayed (i.e. set off from the main text by indenting, or changing the font size, and spacing above and below), there will probably be instructions not to set quotations in italic (despite Word’s default style for quotes!), and there will be instructions for how the source of a quotation is set out on the page.

The United Nations style guide is very prescriptive about country names so as not to create diplomatic incidents!

In short, style is there to drive consistency in approach across the entire text, so that the reader has a smooth experience without being jolted out of what they’re reading by flipping between ten and 10, or “these quotes” and ‘these quotes’, or ‘realise’ and ‘realize’.

Consistency of style makes the text look polished and professional, and makes sure the medium doesn’t distract from the message.

Who decides the style?

The publisher, either when establishing the specifics of how their books will look across the imprint (aka house style), or when selecting a readymade style guide to use. The publisher will often specify a dictionary – dictionaries do not always agree on spellings or hyphenation (the classic is, ironically, copy editor, copy-editor and copyeditor, each of which is the preferred spelling by at least one dictionary).

The big hitters in published style guides are New Hart’s Rules in the UK (Oxford style) and the Chicago Manual of Style in the US, but many large professional associations have published style guides that many others follow and many other publishers have released their own style guides to the public, either by publishing them in book form, or making them available on websites.

The copyeditor then takes the style guide, the publisher’s brief on particular things to look out for, and the text itself and, considering all three together, makes judgement calls on when it is necessary to depart from the house-style-with-brief.

Styles aren’t rules, though. They’re a set of conventions, like everything to do with language. So some authors who have strong preferences for a certain way of doing things will negotiate with their acquisitions editor variations from the publisher’s house style.

Scholars may well have encountered ‘style’ because their institution has a set of guidelines on how text should appear when published internally, and at the very least they will have something to give students about the requirements of writing up theses, so the idea of a style guide isn’t a novelty.

I copyedited one university’s REF2021 submissions, and there was a keen need to establish a style so that each report document read as part of a coherent whole and was therefore more convincing. REF2021 published a kind of style guide but as a copyeditor, I found there was a great deal more to pin down.

What’s in a style sheet?

The style sheet records how your copyeditor has dealt with your text. It will include the features of the publisher’s house style guide that apply to your text, plus any specific instructions for your book, either confirming the application of the house style or informing the copyeditor of one or more variations from it.

(In an ideal world, variations from house style go into the publisher’s brief to the copyeditor; in my world, they’re often overlooked. If you’ve agreed variations, and you’re dealing directly with the copyeditor, do make sure you pass these on. It may come as news to the editor!)

The style sheet also records things specific to your book that may not be covered in the publisher’s style guide, such as the spelling, capitalisation, hyphenation and/or use of italics for specialist terms, how clock times and ages are dealt with, whether this century is the twenty-first or 21st, whether AD/BC, ᴀᴅ/ʙᴄ, CE/BCE or ᴄᴇ/ʙᴄᴇ are used, and just about anything you can think of.

If you have features in the book such as boxed text, discussion questions at the end of a chapter, lists of further reading and so on, their treatment will all be recorded in the style sheet.

Don’t forget the word list!

Some copyeditors (I’m one) supply a separate list of spellings. Others include it as a section of the style sheet itself.

Why a list of spellings? The dictionary’s been specified, right?

Because dictionaries record usage, and don’t dictate it, and because:

• English has multiple ways of spelling many words
• books also contain place names, which can vary according to where you’re writing from as well as where you’re writing about
• people spell their names in individual ways (such as bell hooks)
• hyphenation is fluid and the editor may judge it appropriate to go with your predominant usage rather than the first spelling in the dictionary
• some words are transliterated and conventions for that vary over time – indeed people’s names may be spelled differently over time, too
• because authors coin new terminology
• because some authors sprinkle capital letters around for Important Words when the publisher’s style is to be far more sparing and
• because authors just spell things wrong sometimes, or flip between spellings (like not deciding between ‘focussed’ and ‘focused’), and putting some corrected spellings in the word list is a reasonably subtle way of telling the author not to make them wrong again, at proofs time!

OK, got the style sheet, got the word list. Why do I have them?

When you come to check the proofs, you will see that some things look rather different from the way you had them, in the manuscript you submitted to the publisher.

You will also have been given, probably, a ‘budget’ for how many corrections to the proofs you can make, beyond which you may have to put your hand in your pocket and pay for excess corrections.

So you don’t want to waste your budget on things that are just going to get changed back to conform to house style.

Basically, you get the style sheet and word list so you don’t waste time, effort and money, let alone get frustrated and irritated by the number of things you feel you want to change back.

The style sheet and word list are now the standard to which the book has been edited. Unless something in there is fundamentally wrong to the extent that it changes your meaning, take a deep breath and let it go (if you do find something that bad, get in touch with your contact at the publisher right away). Abide by that standard and only mark up on the proofs corrections that are necessary, and won’t get ignored.

If you find that strings of parenthetical references are now in a different order, check the style sheet. You may well find that the publisher has specified that they must be in ascending or descending date order, or in alphabetic order, no matter whether you have them in order of importance.

Don’t expend time and emotional energy shifting everything back! It won’t be accepted by the collator of the proofs, who weighs up all the changes marked by everyone who’s checked the proofs (you as author, a hired proofreader, other contributors, perhaps a series editor) and condenses them into a single set of corrections to be made by the typesetter.

So the answer to the question is…?

Use the style sheet (and word list) to guide you as you check the proofs. If something matches the style sheet, don’t try to change it because it doesn’t match your personal preference. The entire book has been edited to that standard.

Copyeditors, being human beings, will occasionally miss something. If you spot it, mark it up to be fixed to the correct style as set out in the style sheet, and give yourself a pat on the back.