When Invisible Ink editors perform a line edit for an author, we include a style sheet: a concise outline of grammar and formatting rules specific to their manuscript.
With the right editor, the humble style sheet (or style guide) is a powerful tool for improving both your novel and your writing in general. So what goes into a style guide, and, more importantly, what exactly can you get out of them?
Style guides give you consistency
Above all else, style sheets ensure consistency across a manuscript and/or a novel series. They are a shared record of story specifics, a single location where you and your editor can find every proper noun or unique word in your novel.
Style sheets also consolidate the most-important rules of grammar, syntax, and formatting relevant to your novel, usually pulled from the latest edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, the industry standard for fiction manuscripts. But if our guidance will hew closely to Chicago, why go the extra mile and type it out into a style sheet?
At nearly 1,200 pages, the eighteenth edition of Chicago is a real doorstopper. But take it from someone who flips through it every day: It’s a miracle that it’s only 1,200 pages. Your editor will save you a lot of time, patience, and brainpower compiling the most-relevant information into your neat and tidy style sheet, which typically maxes out at three or four pages.
And sometimes authors don’t want to follow the style rules as written, and instead want to write their own rules for how they express their artistic vision on the page. I always think back to K. A. Applegate, author of the Animorphs series, who used angle brackets for telepathic dialogue between shape-shifting teenagers <like this>. You won’t find that usage in the guidance for angle brackets in Chicago—trust me, I looked—but your editor is responsible for these decisions all the same! And the best way to track your departures from convention is with a handy style sheet.
Style sheets improve your writing craft
For many authors, revising a manuscript is an opportunity to identify their writing foibles or learn their idiosyncrasies. Maybe your horror novel uses the word moldering too often, or the detective in your hard-boiled noir novel elides the subjects of every sentence (“Going to find the killer” instead of “I’m going to find the killer”).
While you’re more likely to find these examples in the margins of your edited manuscript than in your style guide, these documents can still pack in a lot of valuable information. We’re happy to teach authors about dangling modifiers and subject-verb agreement through a style guide, but we would be remiss not to reiterate that good style is two, sometimes contradictory things: whatever the latest edition of Chicago says, which may vary from what the edition before said, and self-expression, which you won’t find in any book until you write it.
In the introduction to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, renowned author and editor E. B. White wrote:
Style is an increment in writing. When we speak of [F. Scott] Fitzgerald’s style, we don’t mean his command of the relative pronoun, we mean the sound his words make on paper. All writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable. All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation—it is the Self escaping into the open.
Never forget that writing is both a craft and an art. Where you decide to place the line is between you and your editor.
Style guides give you stylistic freedom
Have you ever written or read a novel that wanted to keep its mistakes?
When wielded deftly and intentionally, literary devices like malapropism, catachresis, and solecism can give a texture, voice, and dimension to a narrative or a character who uses them in conversation. A style sheet is a great place to track those decisions and ensure they’re upheld.
Style sheets are a tool for future success
A well-kept style sheet is a boon to any editor or proofreader, but it belongs to the author.
Let’s say an author partners with Invisible Ink for a line edit, but would prefer to hand the final proofread over to a trusted colleague. The simplest way to ensure consistency across editing stages is for your Invisible Ink editor to pass the proofreader the style guide.
This also applies to further stages—when you move on to publish and promote your book. Having a style guide that you can share with agents, publishers, additional editors, and marketing copywriters will make everything you do to promote and sell your book that much easier.
What does an Invisible Ink style sheet include?
The 2026 Invisible Ink style guide models its structure after the chapters in The Chicago Manual of Style.
Let’s say you were writing a novel about a zombie invasion in a beach town and the band of misfits who must survive long enough to find the cure. Your style sheet might look something like this:
Example style guide for a fiction novel
Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage
- Transitive vs. intransitive verbs: Transitive verbs require a direct object; intransitive verbs do not.
- (Transitive) Barbara ran the clinic where patient zero reportedly broke loose.
- (Intransitive) Barbara ran as fast as she could from the shambling horde.
- Nonbreaking spaces for ellipses: “Ugh . . . brains . . .”
- Contagious vs. infectious: Contagious diseases are spread by direct contact only. Infectious diseases can be spread through direct and/or indirect contact. The zombie virus is contagious, not infectious.
Proper Nouns and Unique Terms
CHARACTER NAME | ROLE | NOTES |
Barbara Dupont, PhD | Protagonist. Lead researcher at Guidestar Labs. | Green eyes, grey hair. |
Joey Slubish | Boardwalk worker bitten by zombie but mysteriously unaffected. | Drops his Gs in dialogue: “I went fishin’ before we drove over to the skatin’ rink.” |
Barfmagnet | Joey’s dog. | Black cane corso with a white spot on its chin. |
LOCATION NAME | DESCRIPTION | NOTES |
Guidestar Labs | Laboratory where the zombie virus escaped from. | Always one word, never “Guide Star.” |
Somerset Pier and Pavilion | Amusement park where first zombie outbreak occurs. Locals call it “the Sommy.” | Where Joey worked before he was fired. |
The Prestige at 808 | Luxury apartment building where Barbara lives and where the main characters hide from zombies. | Formerly Grateful Gardens Apartments—many still call it that, including Barbara. |
UNIQUE TERMS | DESCRIPTION | NOTES |
skullmunchers | Derogatory term for zombies. Lowercase (though standard grammar rules apply). | Never used by Barbara. |
Hurl-and-Twirl | A ride at Somerset Pier and Pavilion. Shaped like a rainbow octopus with dizzy eyes. | Yellow emergency shut-off button. Runs on a diesel generator. |
harooo | The sound Barfmagnet makes when he smells fresh vomit. | The more excited he is about the contents of the vomit, the more Os. |
Numbers and Abbreviations
- Numerals: Spell out all numbers between zero and one hundred. After that, only spell out round numbers.
- Joey cocked his shotgun. “Three skullmunchers down, four to go.”
- During the off season, only 2,286 people lived in Somerset.
- Their chances of breaking into Guidestar Labs and finding a cure were a million to one—but they had to try.
- Abbreviations: Do not use periods for abbreviations unless uncertainty threatens.
- PhD
- Note: Barbara Dupont has a PhD.
- PhD
- FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)
- CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
- Note: When written out, be sure to use the correct name, never “Center for Disease Control.”
Quotations and Dialogue
- Thought dialogue: When a character thinks in a manner similar to dialogue, italicize what they’re thinking. Do not italicize the “dialogue tag.” Not necessary to italicize when thoughts are part of the running text and do not resemble dialogue.
- What am I doing? Barbarba wondered. Am I in over my head?
- Barbara wondered what it would be like if every zombie in Somerset just went back to the day jobs they had when they were alive. It certainly couldn’t hurt tourism any more than the recession had.
This is just a small sample of what a full style guide might look like, and for a series, you can expect additional tables and charts to track information from one series to the next.
A style guide comes as part of any line editing or proofreading job you take on with Invisible Ink Editing. Are you ready to bring your manuscript to the next level?
