From the FractalPast Editor’s Desk: Your Own Style Sheet

​We often think of style as a kind of literary signature: the punch-you-in-your face brevity of a Hemingway versus the get-lost-in-the-woods prolixity of a Faulkner. Style is certainly a major factor in our enjoyment of fiction, and it undoubtedly plays a role in non-fiction as well. The truthfulness of a poorly-written story cannot overcome its stylistic deficiencies. A well-written and engaging account elevates the experience for your readers.
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Style is important in non-fiction, though in most cases our choices are more constrained than in fiction. Because the aims of non-fiction, generally, are to impart meaning in as precise a way as possible (as opposed to fiction, which is freer to aspire to the poetic), the conventions of English-language prose dictate some choices are better than others. For this reason, most publishing houses demand adherence to a style sheet. If you publish a book with a publisher, you will certainly be supplied with a style sheet with which you are expected to conform. This style sheet, likely derived from one of the major guides in use, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, will offer direction about how to conform your prose mechanics. Questions such as capitalization, abbreviation, proper spelling of technical terms, and so forth will generally be answered. Many of these rules are developed to help make your prose more comprehensible, your meaning more precise. By regulating certain choices, style guides take the guesswork out of meaning for writers and readers alike.

But no in-house style sheet is sufficient to regulate all the possible confusion, and hence all of the choices, that an author has to make. For example, one recent book I edited mentioned a contested road during the Civil War battle of Petersburg: the Jerusalem Plank Road. Most of the time this road was labeled with its full name. Sometimes the author mentioned the “Plank Road,” which then raises the question about whether there was more than one road called “Plank.” The situation really becomes confusing when the text also referred to a “plank road,” which immediately begged the question whether there were other roads in the region that had been planked over, presumably with wooden boards, but which were called something other than “Plank Road,” and which were therefore also something different from the Jerusalem Plank Road. Neither Chicago nor the in-house style sheet will be of much help in a case such as this, which is why it is crucial that an author develop his or her own personal style sheet including capitalization, proper pronouns or abbreviations, and alternate names.
 
Such a style sheet is important for clarity, as the above example illustrates. But your style sheet is also crucial because it establishes the value system which your text or story is attempting to elaborate. All sorts of possibilities about names, about titles, about assigning agency, about how readers should judge your characters, inhere in the choices you make about how to render them. You have choices when, for example, you are working with translated text. What about a name and title in a language other than English: how do you translate the title, and how often do you use it, to convey respect or esteem in English? When and how much should you “fix” the grammar of colloquial speech in a quotation that may not be grammatical in standard English. Many writers in the past have preserved such speech as a way of passing judgment or ridicule on a character, perhaps even unconsciously. Yet “fixing” non-grammatical speech may be disrespectful and deny your character his or her voice. These choices are not always easy and they are seldom self-evident. They require care, compassion, and thoughtful respect. They may even require a disclaimer.
 
I faced this dilemma myself recently in describing a Dutch book written by the pre-eminent scholar J. W. Schulte Nordholt. Schulte Nordholt had published a book in 1956 about American race relations, Het Volk dat in Duisternis Wandelt: De Geschiedenis van de Negers in Amerika. His title employs a word still in common usage in the Dutch language, but recognizable enough as an apparent cognate in American English as to be jarring to modern American readers. Here is how I handled this dilemma [I quote the passage at length to give context]:
 
“But it was not merely garden-variety Jim Crow that worried policymakers. Learned criticisms of American racism did appear and personnel were neither in a position to, nor inclined to, suppress them, however much they may have complained about blows to America’s image abroad. J. W. Schulte Nordholt, a Fulbright grantee, was a case in point. His book, Het Volk dat in Duisternis Wandelt: De Geschiedenis van de Negers in Amerika¸ whose subtitle, it must be firstly acknowledged, does not have the sinister connotations in Dutch it might have to Americans ears, and is rendered in English simply as “The People Who Walk in Darkness: A History of the Negro People in America,” nevertheless seriously worried US officials, as nearly all treatments of American racial segregation did in the period, for its unvarnished criticism of American practices.”
 
How do my readers here think I handled this problem?
 
Style is never only a question of literary quality. It is also about quotidian concerns of power, value, and worth. How do you refer to female characters in a patriarchal environment, whose identity may be obscured either by referring to her by her husband's name, i.e., “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt,” or perhaps in a too-informal way, i.e., “Eleanor”? How do you refer to a disabled person, to a disempowered person, or to a person of rank? It matters, in many of the books I edit, whether “General Robert E. Lee” or “Marse Robert” is making a tactical decision, whether “General Lee” or “Lee” was full of doubt on the eve of a given battle, or whether “General Lee” or “Uncle Robert” was reviewing the troops. The choices you make, about what to call things and when, about how you handle translation and cross-cultural depictions, and about formality and informality in your prose, all matter a great deal.
 
Some of these questions are increasingly being taken up by the major style guides. Chicago, for example, notes that the adjective “black” when referring to a racial group, is increasingly capitalized as “Black,” but that “The decision whether to capitalize . . . is . .  best left up to the writer.” (8.39) Generally, most writers and editors today capitalize “Black” when referring to African Americans (and other Afro-ethnic groups) to denote a “meaningful (and often shared) cultural identity” in the same way that most writers would capitalize “Jew,” “Chicano,” “Native American” and so forth. The question arises, therefore, if “Black” is to be capitalized, whether “White” should be as well. This is a matter of choice, but also a matter of political understanding and ethical commitment: If “Black” is capitalized as referring to a discrete ethnic and cultural identity, does the same rule pertain to “White”? I would argue that “Whiteness” is a discrete cultural identity, but it is also true that many White people (perhaps those most invested in their Whiteness as a discrete cultural identity) do not see White as discrete, but rather as generic. Many "White" people, in other words, would prefer to see the rendering as "white" and thereby escape the implications of "White." The denotation is loaded with political significance, and writers should take account of it in their own writing.
 
Developing your own personal style sheet not only helps you get your meaning across. It may help you to solve dilemmas in your prose, structure, and organization. If certain parts of your meaning are solid, if you don’t have to question precisely what you mean in a given passage, it may help you to see where other parts of the paragraph, section, or chapter are weak.
 
I’m indebted to Letitia Henville (Writing Short is Hard) for inspiring my thinking on this topic, and to Tess C. Rankin whose article at Inside Higher Ed.com first touched on this topic: How and why you should build your own style sheet (opinion). Interested readers should definitely consult Tess’s fine article.