How to Make a Style Sheet

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How do you know whether your business or school requires you to capitalize a certain word or to use a hyphen in this term or that? Unless you’ve memorized a bevy of rules, you need to look it up somewhere. Today’s topic is the editorial style sheet, the perfect place where writers, editors, publishing professionals, office workers, and students can find this kind of information. 

What an Editorial Style Sheet Is and What It Should Contain

An editorial style sheet delineates style standards a company or publisher prefers so that all written documents remain consistent. For example, some companies want certain bullet styles to be maintained throughout; others have strong opinions on hyphens after prefixes like “non.” The style sheet often lists topics alphabetically or is broken down into sections such as “Formatting” and “Commonly Used Terms.” It can cover items such as 

• Whether or not to use a comma after the last in a series (called the serial comma)
• What words should and shouldn’t be capitalized
• What terms and phrases should and shouldn’t be used
• The spelling of commonly appearing names and titles of individuals and entities
• Formatting guidelines, such as when to use bold, when to use italics, and whether to use a period at the end of each bullet in a list

What an Editorial Style Sheet Is Not and Should Not Contain 

A style sheet is different from a style guide.

A style sheet should not be an enormous document that tries to rival tomes like Chicago Manual of Style (1,026 pages) and Garner’s Modern American Usage (942 pages). A style sheet should not, for example, explain the difference between “affect” with an “a” and “effect” with an “e”; if you need to refresh your memory about spelling or grammar rules, you’ll find the information in a dictionary or in a Grammar Girl book. 

As the Handbook for Proofreading states, “The right kind of style sheet is intended to save time and trouble” (1). If the company style sheet is 50 pages long, it likely contains many more rules than employees need to know to complete their work, and they will therefore hesitate to use such a forbidding hunk of paper. And if they do use it, they will probably waste a lot of time looking through it. Therefore, the style sheet should be an easy-to-follow and quick-to-reference document that has all of the important stuff in one place.

How to Streamline Your Style Sheet

A style sheet is not comprehensive. It should include for only the most important items.

Consider streamlining your existing company style sheet by electing a style king or queen, one person who becomes responsible for creating and distributing the style sheet. In addition, your style monarch will need to update the style sheet when names and titles change, or when management changes its mind about issues like bullet points or serial commas. 

This person—perhaps you, the listener?—should ensure that the style sheet contains only absolutely vital items. Arrange the important stuff so that workers can find answers quickly—alphabetically or with clear headings. If your company creates many different kinds of documents or works with various clients and all of these documents and clients require different treatment, create a style sheet for each kind of document. Think “ease of use” here. Creating your style documents may be a lot of work in the beginning, but in the end, workers will save time and frustration. 

If you feel that a brief style sheet cannot possibly convey all of the requirements, create that overly long style sheet, but pull out the highlights and repeat them in an easy-to-read page or two that go in the front. 

What if your company doesn’t have any kind of style sheet? Gasp! Consider volunteering to be the style wizard and to create one. If your boss seems hesitant, say that Grammar Girl sent you! Explain that consistent formatting, spelling, and terminology project professionalism and give workers and the business credibility; it looks sloppy if, for example, the term “Associate” is haphazardly capitalized and if some bullets are indented half an inch while others are indented a quarter. In addition, following a style sheet aids accuracy. Managers undoubtedly want to build credibility and to reduce errors.

Making the Style Sheet Work for You

If your company-produced style sheet is too unwieldy, consider taking matters into your own hands and create a shorter cheat sheet for yourself. After all, a style sheet should make your life easier. Add your own items to it, use sticky notes to highlight commonly used information, and keep a little folder of correct examples that you can refer to. 

Our best advice is to actually use the style sheet! It is your friend and will save you from making bonehead mistakes. Don’t assume that what you think is correct actually is correct. Get used to referring to your handy-dandy style sheet daily and often.

References

1. Killen Anderson, Laura. Handbook for Proofreading, Chicago, IL: NTC Business Books, 1995, pp. 26-27. 

This podcast was written by Bonnie Trenga Mills author of The Curious Case of the Misplaced Modifier, who blogs at sentencesleuth.blogspot.com.