in Editing
The style sheet: a document every book needs
A style sheet is a short record of every choice a book makes about spelling, punctuation and names. It saves more time than almost anything else.
A style sheet is one of the least glamorous documents in publishing and one of the most useful. It is a record of how a particular book handles the choices that style guides leave open. Most professionally edited books have one, and writers who keep their own save themselves and their editors a great deal of work.
What goes in it
A style sheet usually has several sections. The first covers spelling: which variant the book uses where more than one is acceptable. "Judgement" or "judgment". "Towards" or "toward". "Grey" or "gray". "Realise" or "realize". The last is a live choice in British English, where both are correct and different publishers prefer different forms.
The second covers punctuation and typography. Single or double quotation marks. Whether the serial comma is used. How dashes are set, whether as spaced en dashes or closed-up em dashes. How ellipses are formatted. Whether thoughts are italicised.
The third covers capitalisation and hyphenation. Is it "the Government" or "the government"? "Mum" or "mum" when used as a name? "Well-known" or "well known" after a noun? Words like "email" and "online" have shifted over time, and a book should pick one form.
The fourth covers numbers: words or figures, how dates and times are written.
The fifth, in fiction, covers names and invented terms: every character, place and coined word, spelled exactly as it should appear. In non-fiction, it covers technical terms, abbreviations and the preferred forms of names.
Why it matters
A reader who sees "grey" on one page and "gray" on the next may not consciously notice, but a sense of unevenness accumulates. Consistency is part of what makes a book feel finished.
It also saves time. Without a style sheet, every person who works on the book has to rediscover the choices, and they may not reach the same answers. The copy-editor builds on it, the proofreader checks against it, and the typesetter consults it. When a question arises late in production, the style sheet answers it in seconds.
When to start one
The copy-editor traditionally creates the style sheet, but writers benefit from starting their own much earlier. Even a rough list of character names and spellings, begun during drafting, prevents a great deal of inconsistency before it happens.
The simplest approach is to open a document and add to it whenever you make a choice. You decide a character's surname has a hyphen: note it. You settle on how to write a fictional place name: note it. You find yourself unsure whether you have been writing "OK" or "okay": decide, note it, and search the manuscript.
Keep it with the book
Hand the style sheet to your editor with the manuscript, and keep the final version after publication. For a series, the style sheet from the first book becomes the foundation for the second. For a new edition, it tells the next editor what the last one decided.
It is a small document that holds a book together.