What Is a Style Sheet?

When it comes to editing, especially in fiction, every story needs a slightly different approach. This can get downright confusing if you’re doing multiple rounds of editing or working with multiple editors. That’s not as unusual as you might think. You may have an editor make a first pass and then hire a proofreader later on to recheck the text (and save some money).

Anyone who works with a publishing house will likely see their text go through a few different editors, although many authors prefer to have their own editor in addition to the people provided by the publisher. Even if you have a single editor throughout, you may engage someone else as a typesetter or formatter; a style sheet helps them too.

I’ve talked a bit about respecting an author’s voice before, but one of the best ways to ensure that everyone is on the same page (so to speak) is with a style sheet. So, let’s jump into it and see what one is.

Style Sheet

A style sheet is a list of rules that apply throughout the story. They are crucial for consistency and can save author and editor(s) a lot of headaches in the future. Style sheets are useful for everything, non-fiction and poetry too. I mentioned fiction specifically because fantasy and science fiction stories can include new or relatively unknown words.

These rules can include things like:

• Spelling
  • Dialect/Origin (British, American, Australian, etc.)
  • Whether the author is using slang or unusual spellings in text or dialogue
  • The education level of a character if they are a narrator (if they would be aware of certain grammar or spelling conventions, i.e. Huckleberry Finn)
  • Spellings of common but unregulated words such as dammit vs damn it
• Numbers (spelled out or numeric)
• Common abbreviations
• Idioms
• Setting
  • Only relevant in stories that take place in fictional/historical settings
  • Could include variant rules of science, magic, or abilities
  • Geography of the area
• Plot
  • You’ll want to just focus on major strokes here, along with potential plot holes. Obviously, not everything needs to be neatly solved in a single story if it’s a series, but it should make sense.
• Point of View
  • If different scenes have different narrators, you’ll need to track what people know at that time. You don’t want some momentous thought to occur to Jack in chapter 1 and then have Jill reference his revelation later when he’s told no one.
• Tense (authors love switching between present and past tense, often without meaning to)
• Story Timeline
• Characters
  • Personality traits
  • Occupations
  • Descriptions
  • Dialect/Origin/Accents
• Typography (how to denote things with italics/bold/underline)
  • Emphasis
  • Dreams/Memories
  • Thoughts
  • Texts
  • Emails
  • Signs
• Punctuation
  • How en and em dashes are used
  • Single quotes or double quotes
  • When or if parentheses are used
  • Whether to use the Oxford comma
  • Spaces before or after an ellipse
  • Unconventional spellings or capitalization within words (He/Him when referring to God)