Think about you’re own personal style. Do you always wear jeans? No matter what your job requires, you may never leave your house in anything but a short sleeve shirt. Boots? Sneakers? How about jewelry? Personally, I feel a bit off if I don’t have my rings on.
This is what style is and every author has their own writing style.
A style sheet is a list of things that will help you remember decisions you’ve made about what your book looks like (how it reads). However, just like wearing clothing is pretty much a hard set rule, the same applies to writing. Some of these rules might apply to your book, so it’s good to include these in your style sheet too.
As mentioned in Living Documents, a style sheet evolves as you write.
The purpose of a style sheet is to create consistency in your manuscript. It contains decisions that you have made or have researched that need to be remembered and used as you write.
Here is a list of things that might be in your Style Sheet:
- List of words to capitalize (ie: Bible vs. biblical)
- List of words not to capitalize ( ie: Satan vs. satan)
- Where to use punctuation
- When to use italics (ie: Bible verse highlights, book titles, etc.)
- How to format Bible references (ie: spell out book of the Bible or abbreviate, when to use parenthesis)
- Block quote details (ie: punctuation, capitalization, etc.)
- Numbers – (ie: general rule is to spell out less than 100)
- Characters lists and their attributes
MLA and APA styles will help you make the correct decisions in some of these matters.
You may come across things that are particular only to Christian writing. For these, I recommend you use The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style.
Once you have exhausted your research on an item and have found nothing, it is ultimately up to you to decide what to do.