A standard guide for style?

Cyath

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Hello all, back from a long absence here. I'm finally about the start the editing of my first book in earnest, and my advice for my editor (a dear friend with considerable) copywriting experience has told me to standardize the styling in the book - as in, there should be common elements to parentheses, commas etc.

As to which style guide to use - well, I'm kind of stumped on this one! She's told me just to Google it and there are quite a few to choose from. According to her I should just pick one and stick with it - it doesn't matter which.

I figure I'll go with the Chicago Manual of Style (for no other reason that I once lived there) but do I really need to read it from cover to cover? Or do I just need some coherent styling elements?

Please advise!
 

Marlys

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Chicago Manual of Style is a great guide, and widely used by fiction publishers. You don't need to read it cover-to-cover, just use it as a reference to look up things you aren't sure of. If you don't know your own weaknesses, once you get to 50 posts you can put some pages of your ms. up in Share Your Work and people here will help you figure out what you need to focus on.

If you think you need more basic instruction, Strunk & White's Elements of Style is very handy (and short). There are also sites like Purdue OWL which are excellent for brushing up on the mechanics.
 

Old Hack

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Your friend is right that you need to be consistent in your approach to punctuation and so on, but his or her suggestion that you need to use a style guide is really overdoing it, in my view. Chicago is a great guide but it's far too complex for you to need at this stage and as you're likely to have to re-edit your work if it gets picked up you're just wasting your time by using it; and if your publisher uses a different style guide, you're only going to have to redo a lot of the work anyway.

Just make sure you use punctuation etc. correctly (I assume you know how to) and consistently. So, don't switch backwards and forwards between double and single quote-marks, for example. Follow a standard manuscript formatting guide (I think there's one at the top of our Novels section) and you'll be fine.
 

Cyath

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Thanks for all the excellent replies! On further deliberation I think that the CMoS is kind of massive at this stage, and I will probably use the Strunk text first. May go back to the CMoS for the next few books.
 

AW Admin

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Thanks for all the excellent replies! On further deliberation I think that the CMoS is kind of massive at this stage, and I will probably use the Strunk text first. May go back to the CMoS for the next few books.

CMOS is mostly intended for editors, not authors, since the publisher's House Style sheet will select one of the options described by CMOS, in many cases.

Strunk and White is meant for academic writing; specifically for freshman comp essays.

You might want to look at a basic grammar guide (readily available used) like any number of Diana Hacker's books, also written for college English classes, but less specialized than Strunk and White.
 

blacbird

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CMoS is very formal, and designed for very formal writing. Fiction isn't that formal. Be consistent, be sensible, spell things right, and use straightforward punctuation, and you'll be fine. A somewhat less formal style guide would be the Purdue OWL, free on-line. But you can really overworry about this stuff.

caw
 

Jamesaritchie

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Strunk & White is still considered the writer's Bible.

Outside of this, the best possible stylebook is the best novel you have ever read, the one you still think about when the word "novel" enters your mind.
 

AW Admin

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Strunk & White is still considered the writer's Bible.

Outside of this, the best possible stylebook is the best novel you have ever read, the one you still think about when the word "novel" enters your mind.

Only for people who are taking Freshman Comp in the 1990s.

It's a guide to writing humanities essays in Freshman Comp classes. It's not regarded as a "writer's Bible" by anyone with a clue—and it's not even a standard text for Freshman comp, these days.

It doesn't suck, but there are better options, and it has nothing to do with writing fiction.
 

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I agree with AW Admin.

I know lots of publishers which use CMoS, but I don't know any which use Strunk and White. I'm not convinced either are worth writers following.
 

Maryn

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In my experience, CMoS is detailed enough to have a definitive answer on most things that can arise in a manuscript, even if that's not why it exists. Wondering whether to italicize a character imagining his dead brother's advice? Is it a couple bagels or a couple of bagels? When you use the letter V or O to represent a shape, do you italicize it or put it in bold? CMoS has your answers to such niggling details.

But good editors do, too. If you let yourself get waylaid by such minutiae, it's easy to put off submitting lest a goof you didn't even know was a goof is still in your ms.

Maryn, knowing there's a time to edit, a time to submit
 

skyhawk0

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When I edit, I create a stylesheet specific to that book/author. Your own style of writing may be more suited to using the Oxford comma or avoiding it. If you have a character with the last name 'Gray', you might want to spell the colour as 'grey'. Maybe you want to italicize all foreign terms or maybe your book would have so many that you need to distinguish the commonly known ones from the obscure ones. Default to a major style guide when you're unsure what will read well, but where you have multiple options, choose what best suits your own writing.

I set up an Excel spreadsheet with the options I most often have to choose from. Here's my shortlist:

style base: Canadian English, US English, UK English
guide: whether you default to CMoS or other when your guide has no standard for something
numbers: formatting large numbers (1,234,567), what numbers get spelled out (one...ten, 11-19, twenty, hundred, 101…), how to note ranges (10–50 en-dash), do you write them out in dialogue?
decades: long: 1970s, 1970’s short: 70s, ’70’s, the seventies
seasons: capitalized or not
date format: July 1994; August 27th, 1927
centuries: Nineteenth Century, nineteenth century; whether it's hyphenated as an adjective
times: 10 am, 10 a.m., ten a.m., etc.
money: $25, $25.00, 25 dollars, twenty-five dollars
possessives: s’ or s’s
directions: capitalized or not, either as direction or as a place (the North)
celestial: Sun, Moon, Earth capitalized or not
wars: World War One, World War I, World War 1, First World War
provinces and countries: BC, PEI, US, UK or B.C.. P.E.I., U.S., U.K.
measurement: when Imperial and metric get used
address formats: are 'Road' and the like spelled out or abbreviated?
degrees: MD or M.D.
military abbreviations or ranks spelled out

Punctuation:
Oxford comma or not
Em-dash padded or not (spaces on either side)
Ellipses being font based (…) as opposed to three periods (...), whether a sentence ending with one is followed by a period
When single and double quotes get used and whether each go inside or outside punctuation
Formatting for foreign-language terms, legal cases, ship names, book titles, movie titles, painting titles, song titles, article titles, signs, nicknames, and slang terms (italics or Roman, single or double quotes)
Text styles for letters, emails, text messages, poetry, song lyrics, signs, etc.

Then there are common terms with multiple options, like 'grey/gray' above. Is superceded with a 'c' or an 's'? Is skeptic with a 'k' or a 'c'? Is percent one word or two? Are cooperate and stepbrother hyphenated? Do régime, résumé, and façade take accents?

Finally, I list recurring terms that might get misspelled and any proper names (people, places, companies, etc.).
 

WeaselFire

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As to which style guide to use - well, I'm kind of stumped on this one!

Your friend recommended a style but, I assume, not a specific style. So pick one. CMS (Chicago) is most commonly used in many genres, but AP, NY Times, APA and others fit in some circumstances. If you write to the CMS and your publisher wants a different one, the editor will change it anyway.

Jeff
 

Anna Iguana

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It looks like the person posting the question has been gone from this thread a while. Hopefully that person has picked a style guide.