One chapter has a character who is twenty-five years old, and another chapter has a character who is 25. One page capitalizes a term that is lowercase on a different page. One heading has title case; another has sentence case. None of these are major problems, but the collective effect of many small inconsistencies like these is an uneven feel in the manuscript and time wasted by editors who keep asking the same question.
A publishing style sheet is a record of editorial decisions that should be uniform throughout a project. It is not the manuscript and doesn’t take the place of a style book, but rather a short guide to decisions made on an individual publication. It can include spellings; capitalization; punctuation; use of numbers; use of abbreviations; names of characters and places; dates; headings; recurring terms, and other style issues.
It’s particularly helpful when a copyeditor is working on a manuscript. Otherwise, when an editor makes a decision to change a term on page 12, they could have forgotten that decision when they’re copyediting page 80. Another editor might have done it differently. With a good style sheet, there’s no doubt. In addition, it helps clarify author queries. A copyeditor can ask about a different term or usage with a more specific query rather than asking if that term should be changed, since it appears in another form somewhere else in the manuscript.
A style sheet doesn’t have to be extensive. For a short publication it could be broken into several sections that cover names and terms, numbers and dates, capitalization, punctuation, and heading style. For the names and terms section, for example, you’d write “ebook” instead of “e-book,” and the full name for any acronym used for a fictional company. For numbers, you might note which forms of age, measurements, and chapter numbers are spelled out versus which are written as numerals. The point is not to compile a complete book of style, but to record decisions you can easily forget, unusual uses of style, and decisions that are likely to be repeated.
An example of a good use of the style sheet is to take 2 or 3 pages from a sample manuscript, look at every repeated decision made, and note it. This will include names, words with hyphens, numbers, abbreviations, and titles, as well as quoted passages and headings. Then, create a 1-page style sheet, then take another 2 or 3 pages and go over it again. What information would make you do any corrections that you might make later? You don’t want the sheet to be filled with style decisions from books of style and usage that will never appear in the manuscript, since then the purpose of the sheet is defeated.
In addition, proofreading and pageproof checking is easier with a style sheet. The proofreader, for instance, has all of the headings, captions, running heads, and recurring terms listed in a central location rather than having to search the pages for them. And if the manuscript changes as it moves through production, it is easily adjusted along with the master manuscript. A good style sheet is used during the copyediting and final proof corrections, and serves as a resource for all the proofers. It’s the easiest way to know how a publication handles its repeated use of small style details.