Should You Be Using an Editing Style Sheet?

By Adam Lawrence, Freelance Editor

As an editor, many of your clients follow an established style guide (e.g., AP, Chicago Manual, AMA), with their grammar and other editorial preferences already set out in that single document. However, sometimes a client may leave style choices up to the editor. In those cases—especially if you’re editing a larger (e.g., book-length) project—you’ll quickly find that compiling a style sheet will save you time and ease your work. Also, having such a project-specific tool at hand can reduce your room for error.

A style sheet is a document that tracks unusual spelling, rules for hyphenated words, special characters, and other elements specific to the project. While it is a great help to you, the editor, it also gives the client a rationale for editing changes—why, for example, you made a wholesale conversion of a special character/symbol, or why you lowercased what had been uppercased.

I once worked with two other editors on a large guidebook for students studying for the GRE. Not a week into the project, we realized there were too many unique elements to recall without having some kind of reminder system. In addition to checking the accuracy of the quiz questions, we also needed to review questions for stylistic consistency. We had questions: “Would the alphabetical character x suffice as a multiplication sign, or was there a preferred symbol?” After skimming several math books, we kept seeing the same symbol (×), so we added that to our style sheet.

The guidebook also had lots of different headings—for chapter titles, chapter section titles, chapter subsection titles, and so on. We had to figure out the heading hierarchy—for example, when headings should be in “Title Case” or “Sentence case.” After consulting with the client, we settled on a hierarchy and added it to the style sheet.

In the end, the editing job was a monumental task (lasting several months), but a style sheet made our lives much easier and our work possibly better.

For an excellent introduction to creating and using style sheets, check out Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook (third edition; Berkeley: UC Press, 2011), pp. 47–53. A ready-to-adapt style sheet is also available here.