What is a stylesheet? Well, you’ve probably at least heard of or at best worked with style manuals such as The Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press Handbook of Style, or the Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association. You might even be familiar with The Elements of Style! These manuals tell you how to present your work in such a way that it’s clear and consistent. Wikipedia says, “A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field. The implementation of a style guide provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document.”

A style sheet begins where the style guide leaves off. Essentially it’s a document in which you maintain the “right” way to do things for the specific manuscript you’re working on. If it’s a nonfiction manuscript, you’ll want to include formatting issues, header information, and so on. If you’re dealing with fiction, then stylesheets are truly the best way to keep continuity: how many stories have you read in which Mary has black hair on page 14 but red hair on page 362?

Now I expect that most writers who are reading this will by now be shrugging it off. Isn’t that something my editor should do? Why should I be bothered?

There are a couple of reasons you should create a style sheet:

• It’s the kind thing to do. I didn’t create a style sheet for a recent novel, and doing so would have saved both the editor and myself a great deal of time, as I had to change some of her changes back to the original, and explain why. It would have been far better to have made that explanation upfront.
• It’s the efficient thing to do. How many times have you had to flip back in your book to remind yourself of a minor character’s last name, to check a date, or to remember what you said about Aunt Sophie? Easier just to turn to your style sheet to find the answers.

For nonfiction writers, style sheets are essential to keep you on track and eliminate long conversations with your editor when the time comes.

Many if not most publishers have their own style sheets (sometimes referred to as style guides); ask for them. It’s always easier to set up a manuscript correctly than to go back in and correct it later! Do that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

At the grocer’s, when there’s a sign announcing that broccoli is on “special.” On an internet message board, when a contributor notes that “such is my ‘opinion,’ whether others agree or not.”

They’re quotation marks, and they’re almost as widely misused as are apostrophes. When placed around a word or phrase as in these examples, they’re called “scare quotes” … and, man, are they scary! The use of the term seems to date from the first half of the 20th century. Occurrence of the term in academic literature appears as early as the 1950s.

Wikipedia to the rescue: “Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. When the enclosed text is a quotation from another source, scare quotes may indicate that the writer does not accept the usage of the phrase (or the phrase itself), that the writer feels its use is potentially ironic, or that the writer feels it is a misnomer. This meaning may serve to distance the writer from the quoted content.

“If scare quotes are enclosing a word or phrase that does not represent a quotation from another source they may simply serve to alert the reader that the word or phrase is used in an unusual, special, or non-standard way or should be understood to include caveats to the conventional meaning.

“Alternatively, material in scare quotes may represent the writer’s concise (but possibly misleading) paraphrasing, characterization, or intentional misrepresentation of statements, concepts, or terms used by a third party. This may be an expression of sarcasm or incredulity, or it may also represent a rhetorical attempt to frame a discussion in the writer’s desired (non-standard) terms (e.g. a circumlocution, an apophasis, or an innuendo).”

I’m not going to say that they are not sometimes appropriate, because there are many excellent uses for scare quotes, many of them noted in this article:

1. a term used only by a limited number of persons: Linguists sometimes employ a technique they call “inverted reconstruction.”
2. a way to express disapproval: The Institute for Personal Knowledge is now offering a course in “self-awareness exercises.”
3. a way to show that what is being stated is not, in fact, necessarily true: The Serbs are closing in on the “safe haven” of Gorade.
4. a means to indicate a euphemism: Sharon Stone made dozens of “adult films” before getting her Hollywood break.

I have no quarrel with these usages of scare quotes. After all, one can hardly misuse something unless there is, on the other side, a correct way to use it!

But as the wonderful “blog” of “unnecessary quotation marks” is constantly noting, there is a plethora of examples of misuse. Check them out: I guarantee you’ll enjoy them!

A few choice examples:

• Grab a “drink” and get a “snack” on the house!
• Turn off your “cell phone”!
• Great “hot” food!
• We are “open”!

The list goes on and on (to my not-so-secret delight). Do you have examples you’ve seen recently of the misuse of scare quotes? Share them here! Please! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Entries for 2011 include:

• Viral: an illness can be viral; a YouTube video is not.
• Epic: “an epic annoyance,” say the editors. My favorite comment: “Standards for using ‘epic’ are so low, even ‘awesome’ is embarrassed.”
• Fail: no, it’s not a noun. It’s not even an adjective. It’s a verb. If you can’t use it as a verb, don’t use it.
• Refudiate: just because Sarah Palin is stupid doesn’t mean that we have to be, too.
• Just sayin’: “Do we really need a qualifier at the end of every sentence? ” No, I say, no! (just sayin’ …)

There are many more here for your reading pleasure.

Not that it matters, of course. Lake Superior State University is not the University of Chicago, after all, and it seems improbable that this website is going to change labguage usage … perhaps it just is there to give those of us who care about this sort of thing a chuckle. Or a moment of despair.

What words would you like to banish from the present crop of neologisms, verbisms, and general Humpty-Dumpty speech? Let me know, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

“All of the comma usages you demonstrated would have been perfectly correct in 1869. Such details of punctuation are the stuff of style more than grammar, which is to say that they are conventions chosen arbitrarily and therefore subject to arbitrary change. Grammarians writing about usage made choices (as the editors of Chicago continue to make choices today) in situations where someone else might choose differently. They then set forth their choices as standards people might choose to follow so as to be consistent from page to page and chapter to chapter.

“While a foolish consistency may indeed be the hobgoblin of little minds, and while consistency in comma usage might be seen by some as foolish, nonetheless, authors don’t want their books held up to ridicule or dismissed as unworthy on the basis of inconsistent editing.

“So there is value in having a style and sticking with it until the last page. But styles change. Style guides fall into and out of fashion. And so on. By the time Stein was complaining, fashions in comma usage were changing radically. The Autobiography was published in 1933. Elements of Style was published in 1918.”

While these two people were discussing comma use, Dick raises a point that I find myself consistently trying to get across: the difference between grammar and usage. And I like the analogy of usage with fashion. Yes, it can be arbitrary. Yes, you might not like it a great deal. But using it consistently, while not making you a fashion guru, will at least keep you from making a fashion faux pas.

And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

An acronym is a word created from the first letters of each word in a series of words. An example of an acronmy is AIDS, which stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

PC is an acronym; it stands for personal computer. “MAC” is not an acronym for anything, and I wish more people were aware of that fact. It’s an abbreviation (which is something else entirely) for Macintosh, a brand of Apple computers. It should carry an initial capital letter (because it refers to a proper noun) but the rest should be lowercased: Mac.

Of course, many acronyms have gone the way of some proper nouns and have infiltrated the language without due respect: few people know that laser should really be capitalized, as it stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, or that scuba is actually self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, in the same way that no one really remembers when linoleum and kleenex were considered proper nouns. (Well, Kleenex is still fighting the good fight, but it’s a losing one.)

Language may be in a state of constant flux and change is inevitable, but there’s no excuse for misusing the language we have today out of sheer laziness. Pay attention, and then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!