Style sheets

Number of entries received for the 2008 InnermoonLit Award for Best First Chapter of a Novel to date: 16

If the English language were our mother, she would be the cool, laid-back kind, the kind that inspires longing and envy in children with strict parents. There are some haphazardly put-together rules, but if you really want to, you can break a lot of them and still not be “wrong” or get into any real trouble. Sewwww-weet, huh?

But that wishy-washy, namby-pamby type of parenting comes with its own set of frustrations. I'm sure you've heard Dr. Phil and his ilk say that children crave discipline and order. I don't know whether I agree with that, but I know how frustrating it is to try to teach grammar. Just when it looks like a lightbulb has gone off and your students understand the rule you're explaining, you have to do a 180 and include the many exceptions to that rule.

Black-and-white, hard-and-fast rules can be comforting. But no, our mom is a freedom-loving hippie who doesn’t believe in such things and is full of waffling exceptions: “‘i’ after ‘e,’ I say! Well, OK…except after ‘c’…or in long ‘a’ sounds like 'weigh' and 'neighbor'…” “A comma must always come before the coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence! Unless it’s a very short clause and there’s no risk of confusion, in which case, you can leave it out if you want to…” “Sentences shouldn’t be started with a conjunction or ended with a preposition…unless enough people start doing it...or it is appropriate for your purpose and audience...then it’s OK.”

It’s enough to make you long for a stricter language.

As a writer, you have the freedom to decide so many things: alternate spellings, whether you use or omit the last comma in items in a series, phonetic spellings, etc. It seems more professional, though, to have some consistency within a manuscript so that your choices seem deliberate, not random. I don’t mind ‘canceled’ or ‘cancelled,’ but somehow it bothers me when I see an author switch back and forth in the same piece of writing.

That’s where a style sheet comes in. I first learned about this wonderful tool when I was working on the Stripmall project. A style sheet is simply your own personalized usage manual/dictionary that can help you be consistent when faced with alternate spelling and usage situations. Phonetic spellings, slang terms, and proper names (particularly those you make up) can’t be looked up in the Prentice Hall Handbook, so make yourself a running list that you can refer back to when it’s line editing time.

It’s a great idea to make a semi-permanent style sheet for yourself with your general preferences listed, but you also need a customized sheet for each book or story that includes any unusually spelled or fictitious proper nouns. Usually a style sheet for a novel ends up being just a page or two, which is ideal for quick reference.