Many writers have a yellowed copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style among their possessions. Mine quotes the New York Times on the cover: “Buy it, study it, enjoy it. It’s as timeless as a book can be in our age of volubility.” Hear, hear. Every writer ought to read Strunk and White at some point. It doesn’t take long. As writers’ guides go, theirs is pithy and fairly entertaining.
That said, there are subjects on which The Elements of Style is unhelpful, and one of these is the difference between grammar, writing style, and editorial style (also called house style). This is a shame, because I think for many writers the distinctions between these three concepts remain fuzzy, and this can make the experience of being edited frustrating, to say the least.
Lucky writers get published, and when they do, they get edited. Even if you haven’t managed to land your manuscript on an editor’s or agent’s desk yet, someone (ideally multiple someones) ought to be editing your work. And in every case, it’s the author’s responsibility to do her level best to learn from the editing process, so as not to repeat the same mistakes in every manuscript.
When you’re trying to learn from edits, it helps enormously if you can sort out the difference between grammar mistakes, issues with your writing style, and simple changes the editor has made to bring your manuscript into conformity with editorial style, or house style. If they all look the same to you, you’ll have a hard time sussing out which edits are mandatory and which you’re permitted to interpret as suggestions. You’ll also find it hard to decide which changes apply “rules” you ought to be learning, as opposed to choices your editor has made due to the constraints of house style, or even due to her personal preferences.
Thus this post, which is intended to introduce the key distinctions between grammar, writing style, and editorial style, as well as to offer a quick overview of the main categories editorial style covers.
Grammar (or more properly syntax, but let’s not split hairs) is probably the simplest place to start. To borrow a phrase from Strunk and White, grammar deals with “what is correct, or acceptable, in the use of English.” Grammar is all about making it possible for readers to understand what you mean. It is the only area of writing in which there really can be said to be rules, as opposed to recommendations or guidelines: You must capitalize the first word of your sentence. You must end your sentence with an appropriate final punctuation mark. You must put a comma before the conjunction that joins two independent clauses (see this post). And so on. If you don’t follow the grammar rules, readers will struggle to understand your prose. They’ll misstep. They’ll get irritated with you and abandon your book for a better one. (But no one will hang or imprison you. Grammar has rules, not laws. Break them if you like, but do it knowingly.)
Style is a murkier area. Most of the time, when writers talk about style, they mean writing style: “style” in the sense of how to write well, how to compose words that “explode in the mind,” as Strunk and White put it. Use active verbs, avoid the passive voice, show rather than tell: fiction writers, and especially newbie fiction writers, are inundated with recommendations on how to improve their writing style. There are lists all over the Internet (Elmore Leonard’s being one of the most well-known) demanding that we never use adverbs with our speech tags, ban the word “verdant” from our vocabularies, and generally eschew obfuscation.
Fair enough. But when it comes to writing style, all of these “rules,” demands, and imperatives must be understood as nothing more than recommendations. The passive voice is not an abomination; it’s a perfectly legitimate construction. Sometimes, putting an adverb with your speech tag tells the reader something you want her to know. You are the author. You get to decide whether to follow any and all recommendations about your writing style.
(Also–and this is a post for another day–a whole slew of writing-style recommendations, including the old saws “never split an infinitive” and “never end a sentence with a preposition,” are actually based on outmoded usage recommendations that ought to be trashed. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, for the love of God, go buy a copy of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. It’s an orgasmically amazing resource that offers evidence-based recommendations on everything from the difference between “foreword” and “foreward” to whether it’s acceptable to call someone an “old bugger.” <insert geeked-out editor sigh here>)
The other type of style writers have to get familiar with is editorial style, also known as house style.
Every reputable publisher has a house style that governs how its editors treat dozens of different elements that make up a manuscript: punctuation usage and placement, hyphenation, spelling, capitalization, numbers, quotations, abbreviations, and so forth. On a larger scale, there are any number of defined editorial styles that affect whole swathes of writing. I pay the bills as an editor for academics, and my bible is the Chicago Manual of Style. The fifteenth edition is 956 pages long, and honestly, if I could marry it, I totally would. It’s that impressive. If you’ve ever written for a newspaper, you probably had to learn AP style. In college lit classes, maybe you picked up a little MLA style. There are others. Many, many others.
While it’s easy to find resources on grammar and writing style, editorial style isn’t flashy, and it doesn’t get a lot of love from the Internet. Thus, below I offer a quick run-through of the sort of things editorial style governs. We’ll stick to fiction, because you don’t want to get me going on footnotes.
Punctuation
The serial comma. Do you write “A man, a woman, and a kiss” or “A man, a woman and a kiss”? It depends entirely on house style. Harlequin uses the first convention, which is known as the “serial comma.” Samhain prefers the second. Neither is wrong.
Quotation marks and final punctuation. Option 1: “Tell me, darling, when did you last get laid?” she asked, trailing one mischievous fingernail over his bicep. “And don’t tell me ‘last week,’ because that didn’t count.” Option 2: ‘Tell me, darling, when did you last get laid?’ she asked, trailing one mischievous fingernail over his bicep. ‘And don’t tell me “last week”, because that didn’t count’. The former style is predominant in the United States, the latter in the UK. Both are acceptable (though the second makes my eyes bleed).
Introductory phrases. Should you write, “Today, I’m going to find someone to hump,” or should you write, “Today I’m going to find someone to hump”? What about “Every time I see his biceps I want to lick them”? Is “Every time I see his biceps, I want to lick them” superior? So long as omitting the comma doesn’t create problems for ease of reading, this is purely a matter of house style.
Spelling and Hyphenation
Variant spellings. Is is “gray” or “grey”? “All right” or “alright”? “Afterward” or “afterwards”? These are all variant spellings, and your publisher’s editorial style will govern which one ends up in your book. None of them is objectively wrong. That said, when it comes to British English versus U.S. English variants, it’s best to stick with one type of spelling throughout your work. If you want to get published with a U.S.-based publisher, go with “gray,” “all right,” and “afterward.”
Foreign words. Whether or not foreign words and phrases are italicized will depend on your publisher’s house style. However, note that foreign-language proper nouns–El Duce, the Alhambra, the Galleria degli Uffizi–do not require italics. Ever. Also, generally speaking, if it’s in an English dictionary, you don’t need to italicize it. “Chimichanga” doesn’t require italics. Neither does “adios.” But “Je t’aime” does, unless you’ve written your entire manuscript in French.
Hyphenation. Hyphenation is a tricky business, and one that ninety-nine out of a hundred people find less interesting than I do. Suffice to say that in-house style guidelines determine whether your heroine has a “multiorgasmic” experience or a “multi-orgasmic” one, as well as whether those orgasms were “earth shattering” or “earth-shattering.”
Capitalization
Personal names and titles. Is your hero Editor-in-Chief of a newspaper, or merely the editor-in-chief? If he hails from this side of the Mason-Dixon Line, is he a Northerner or a northerner? Did your heroine have a Caesarean section or a caesarean section? All determined by the conventions of house style.
Numbers and Numerals
Words or numerals. In most nontechnical contexts, numbers below 101 are spelled out. Your heroine is twenty-five years old. She’s a twenty-five-year-old heroine. Perhaps she has a five-year-old kid. But house style will decide whether this means she’s spent twenty-five percent of her life as a mother, or 25 percent, or even 25 per cent. If you’re looking for certainty, take heart: it’s a near-universal rule that you can’t begin a sentence with a numeral. So if you want to title your novel 1992, get used to seeing “Nineteen-ninety-two is the best book I’ve ever read.”
