Spelling, style, and house rules

American or British spelling and punctuation?

The market decides, and the market is usually the one the book is being published into rather than the one the author lives in. Copy editing includes localizing content and converting measurements, which means adapting a text to a market is a recognized editorial task rather than an imposition.¹

The choice is wider than spelling. It covers quotation mark placement relative to punctuation, single or double quotation marks, the treatment of abbreviations such as Mr and Mrs, date order, and which dictionary settles a doubtful word.

Where an author has not decided, an editor can set out what each choice commits the book to and then apply it consistently. What no editor should do is apply their own country's conventions by default and leave the author to discover it on delivery.

Which style manual, if any?

For books published in the United States, the Chicago Manual of Style is the usual answer. It is written for exactly that purpose, and its opening chapters cover the parts of a book and the preparation and editing of a manuscript.² Journalism uses the Associated Press Stylebook instead, which reaches different conclusions on several visible points.³

Academic work often follows a discipline's own manual instead. Which one applies is set by the publisher or the journal rather than by the author, and it is one of the first things worth confirming.

Fiction is the case where the answer is least automatic, and it is treated in the next question. A book with no stated manual has one anyway, assembled by whoever edits it, which is an argument for naming one rather than leaving it implied.

Should fiction follow a style guide at all?

It should, with the understanding that a novel departs from the guide on purpose in places a nonfiction book would not. Chicago's own editors make this point: knowing the style rules is what gives a writer the choice of when to follow them and when to break them.⁴

The same source draws the line between a choice and a slip with a small example. Fiction can legitimately have one character say ten dollars while another states the same amount differently. It cannot legitimately use figures in one place and words in another for no reason at all.⁴

The practical function of a manual in fiction is to settle everything the author has no opinion about, which is most of it. That leaves the author's attention for the places where they do.

Do I have a style sheet, a character list, or a series bible?

All three are records of decisions, at increasing scale. A style sheet covers one book's spellings, hyphenation, capitalization, and number handling. A character list covers names, ages, relationships, and physical details. A series bible covers everything that has to stay true across several books.

Editors Canada places the development of style sheets inside copy editing, so a book that arrives without one will leave with one.¹ Arriving with one is better, because the author's version records intentions and the editor's version can only record what the text does.

For a series the stakes rise sharply. A detail contradicted in book three was established in book one and is already in print, and no editor working on book three can know that without the record.

Are there preferred spellings, invented words, or names that must not be changed?

This is the single most useful list an author can send, and it takes ten minutes. Invented words, deliberately unconventional spellings, dialect forms, brand names spelled the owner's way, and characters whose names look like typographical errors all belong on it.

Without the list, each one produces a query, and forty queries about names is a slow way to spend an edit. With it, they are entered on the style sheet before the pass begins and never come up.

Names of real organizations and products carry a separate check. An editor verifies that a trademark is spelled the way its owner spells it, which is a matter of record rather than of preference.

The list is worth keeping open while writing rather than assembled at the end. Authors who compile it in one sitting reliably forget the terms they invented earliest, which are the ones most likely to have drifted.

Which measurement system?

Whichever the book's market uses, applied consistently, with conversions where a reader would otherwise have to do arithmetic. Converting measurements is listed as part of copy editing, so this is ordinary work rather than a special request.¹

Historical and technical writing complicates it. A source that reports a distance in one system should usually be quoted as it stands, with a conversion supplied nearby if the reader needs one, because altering a quoted figure changes a quotation.

Fiction has a further consideration, which is what the characters themselves would say. A character measuring in one system while the narration uses another is a legitimate choice. It needs recording on the style sheet, or a copyedit will standardize it away in good faith.

How should numbers, dates, and times be handled?

These are style-manual questions with answers that differ between manuals, which is why the manual gets named first. Chicago's Q&A on numbers in fiction advises spelling out numbers in dialogue wherever it can be done without awkwardness, while treating years as numerals.⁵

Dates carry a further trap in books with an international readership, because a numeric date can be read two ways. Spelling the month removes the ambiguity entirely, at a cost in space that almost never matters in prose.

Times, ages, percentages, and money each have their own conventions. Memorizing them is not the useful part; recording what this book has decided is. That record is the style sheet, and it is what makes chapter thirty consistent with chapter two.

Should the numbers be spelled out?

Not all of them, and the dividing line is a house decision rather than a truth. Chicago's guidance for fiction leans toward spelling out in dialogue, on the grounds that figures on the page do not sound like speech.⁵

Narration is usually treated differently from dialogue, and technical or statistical material differently again. A history with hundreds of dates and quantities reads badly with all of them spelled out, and a novel reads badly with figures scattered through conversation.

What an editor needs is the rule the book will follow, stated once. Applying two rules in different parts of a book is defensible where the parts are doing different jobs. It is indefensible where it happened by accident, and the two look identical on the page.

Serial commas or not?

Chicago requires the serial comma, putting a comma before and, or, or nor connecting the last two items in a series, on the grounds that it adds precision by demarcating those last two items clearly.³ The Associated Press Stylebook takes the opposite default, using it only where its absence would create ambiguity.³

Both positions are defensible and neither is an error. What is an error is a book that uses it in some chapters and not others, which is the condition most manuscripts arrive in.

The decision costs an author nothing, while imposing the consistency afterward costs an editor a pass. Naming it in advance is one of the few style questions genuinely worth settling before a word is edited.

Is there a house style I have to follow?

If a publisher is involved, almost certainly, and it outranks every other authority including the author's preference. House styles exist to make a list of books look like one publisher's list, and they cover spelling, punctuation, capitalization, treatment of numbers, and often the citation system.

The document is usually supplied on request and frequently is not supplied unless requested. An author who has a contract and has never seen the house style should ask for it before commissioning any editing, because a copyedit done to the wrong specification has to be redone.

Where no publisher is involved, the author is the house. That is a real position with real consequences: every decision a house style would have made now has to be made once and recorded. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, style sheets and house specifications included.