Style sheet

A style sheet is the working document an editor builds during a copy edit, recording every spelling, name, hyphenation, capitalisation and continuity decision made about that specific manuscript.

A typical one has two halves.

The word list is alphabetical and specific to your book: grey not gray, OK not okay, whisky not whiskey, T-shirt hyphenated, the made-up word you use nine times and spelled three ways.

The reference section holds everything else — character names and their spellings, place names, a timeline of the story's days, physical details like ages and eye colour and the make of the car, and the general rules chosen for the book: serial comma or not, base dictionary, style guide, how numbers and dates are set, how dialogue and internal thought are treated.

Its purpose is that a decision gets made once and then applied everywhere, by everyone who touches the book afterwards. The proofreader inherits it. So does the translator, the audiobook director, and you, two years later, writing book two and trying to remember whether the town had one L or two.

Ask for the style sheet at the end of any copy edit. It is part of the deliverable, and it is the single most useful file to keep.