Style and Substance

Every publisher has its own house style. Most trade book publishers base their style on the Chicago Manual of Style. (I would like to believe that the fact I graduated from CMS's birthplace and home, the University of Chicago, makes me more expert in its content than other people. I would be fooling myself.)

"Style" goes beyond the rules of (American) English grammar. (And as an aside, what I mean here by style is a little different from what you as a reader might refer to as an author's style, which is his or her tone and voice as a writer.) It takes in anything one might have to make consistent decisions about, e.g., what to capitalize, what to abbreviate, when to use numerals and when to spell numbers out, or how to cite references to source material. The rules CMS sets out aren't arbitrary; they serve a purpose in producing clear, readable books. Similarly, the rules a publisher sets out in its house style serve the needs of that publisher's books. For example, although CMS calls for spelling out numbers up to a hundred as well as larger round numbers, publishers of craft books or cookbooks are likely to make it their style to use numerals throughout because of the quantities and measurements that are integral to their books.



AP (Associated Press) style is used by newspapers and many magazines. AP style calls for more numerals and fewer commas; whereas CMS assumes a substantial document that the reader is spending a lot of time with, AP is all about efficient use of space and reading time. It had its birth in narrow columns and hand-set type on tight deadlines, and still serves to keep text short, sweet, and rapidly digested.

If the style doesn't serve the reader, it's done a disservice. (Everything about a book should serve the reader. Anything that gets in the way of the author communicating with the reader is a great big FAIL.) Consistency isn't the hobgoblin of small minds: it's a way of preventing distraction. If something is capitalized on one page and the same thing is not capitalized somewhere else, that might catch your eye, and you might think it's a typo, or you might wonder if there's a reason for it (because there are times when capitalization may vary to convey different meaning--the general versus the specific, for one). Either way, it has you thinking about something other than sharing the author's thought and meaning, and that is a bad thing.

Good editors (acquiring editors, project editors, production editors, copy editors, et al.--editors come in lots of flavors, but that's a topic for a different day) make decisions about style to meet the needs of the book. My house style is mainly CMS--but we might decide to use numerals throughout the running text a book about mathematics rather than spell them out, to be consistent--or we might spell them out in non-mathematical contexts so to distinguish from mathematical expressions; we might use AP style for a book of articles collected from newspapers, rather than enforce our style over AP's; we are generally more persnickety about fine points of grammar in a book about history or politics and less so in a first-person travelogue, where the author's conversational voice is what we want you to hear as you read. Because of the breadth of what we publish where I work, we probably make more decisions and exceptions book by book than would a house with a narrower range.

I feel strongly about upholding standards of grammar, usage, and punctuation (as you probably know). Those rules serve a purpose in English: subtle distinctions exist to convey shades of meaning. Moreover, as a reader, you ought to be able to trust the publisher to get the language right. If we don't do that, are you sure you can trust us to get the content right? I don't want you to stop to doubt.

But style, as I said, goes beyond that. All our decisions should be geared toward smoothing the connection between author and reader, delivering the author's message or story or knowledge with clarity and without distraction, so that what we do is invisible, leaving you as a reader to get lost in the book.