By Robert Christopherson

A key to facilitate the flow of manuscript through the production process is an author-prepared Style Guide, or Editorial Style Guide, specific to the author’s book. The Style Guide is sent along with the manuscript to editors, project managers, CEs, and DEs. The Guide adds efficiency to the writing process and eliminates countless back-and-forth to check what the author wants and prefers.

There are several comprehensive published style guides available. For the past 35 years, I found the The Chicago Manual of Style most helpful, now in its 18/e. I think I first used the 1969, 12/e.  The first edition of the CMOS was 1906. What I am suggesting here is a short, personalized Style Guide, specific to your writing. My texts are in Earth systems science and physical geography. Your guide will vary depending on your subject discipline.

An example—my first edition of the main text was 1992. I am now working on the 11/e of this text. At that time, you generally saw Earth treated as a common noun, as in “the earth’s atmosphere,” “people of the earth,” “Mercury, Venus, earth, and Mars…” However, I used Earth as a proper noun when referring to the planet and I recall defending this with editorial people, fighting for this elevation to proper noun status. Today, this capitalization is almost universal!

After all, Earth is a specific person, place, or thing, and therefore grammatically correct. I did not use the article the, for consistency with the way other planets were treated. Therefore, I present “Earth’s atmosphere,” and “surface of Earth,” and “Earth’s oceans,” etc. Since don’t say things like, “the rings of the Saturn.” Earth deserves the same grammar treatment as the other planets. My point in mentioning this is that there are items specific to your text that you want presented and treated in a certain way. My Style Guide presents “Earth” to guide production.

Please note, I use the word as a common noun when referring to the unconsolidated materials that make up the land, as in “tilling the earth,” or “earthworms,” or in the context of soils, or earthflows in geomorphology, etc.

My Style Guide is presently 20 pages in length. Please know that my Style Guide is evolving and forever in process, never finished or completed.  An instruction added to the top of my Style Guide says:

The main sections of my present Style Guide, with some brief subject sampling:

Numbers, Dates, and Units

• When to spell numbers, handling big numbers
• Abbrev, hyphen usage, and running text usage
• Use of commas (Canadian editions have different rules than U.S. with numbers)
• Expressing ranges and ordinals
• Dates, decades, and time
• Percentages
• Em—dash, En–dash usage
• Chemical formulas and equations

Abbreviations

• Period after in. and other unit abbrev.
• SI Units
• Coordinated Universal Time, UTC (not CUT); a.m. and p.m.
• Delta, micron, and other symbols
• When to spell out names
• A list of all acronyms for scientific groups, studies, agencies, and terms

Punctuations and Italics (e.g., if the glottal stop in Hawai‘i is missing it is misspelled)

• Examples of proper usage of diacritical marks, e.g., Hawai‘i,
• When to use italics, usage in animal names
• Punctuation before and after a colon
• Names of ships, satellites, space craft, magazines, books
• Hyphen for compound words
• When to use an Em—dash to break a thought in a sentence

General Comments and Special Situations

• AOU specifies bird name with capital first letters, e.g., Mallard Duck
• When to bold face, when to use italics or emphasis
• Capitalizing geographic regions

Alphabetical Listing of Geographic Names

• Illustrating spelling, diacritical marks
• E.g., Amazon River Basin, Antarctic ice sheet, Dust Bowl, Great Plains, etc.

Footnote Style

• Examples

Photo Credits Style

• Examples

Miscellaneous

• Washington DC (no periods)
• Handling cross-references in text
• Roman numerals
• Rules for running heads
• Rules for presenting URLs in text

Specific Word Usage (alphabetical listing of key terms)

• Notations: (n) noun; (v) verb; (adj) adj preceding noun; (adv) adverb; (pa) predicate adj; (col) collective noun; (s) singular; (pl) plural; (d) diacritical—
• Some examples: climate-change (adj)
• climate-dependent (pa)
• close-up (n, adj)
• cloud-covered (pa)
• cloud-free (pa)
• coastline (1 word)
• ground cover
• ground ice (adj)
• groundwater (1 word)

Over the years my style guide expanded as I learned more about our craft and my subject discipline. I found this tool to be a valuable baseline. Also, I found production people appreciated it over the years. The best in your writing!

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Robert Christopherson is Professor Emeritus of Geography at American River College (1970-2000). He is the author of the leading physical geography texts in the U.S. and Canada all published by Pearson Prentice Hall. He and his nature photographer wife Bobbe have completed fourteen expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic regions since 2003, gathering information and photos for his books, Geosystems, 10/e, Elemental Geosystems, 9/e, Geosystems Canadian Edition, 5/e, and Applied Physical Geography, 10/e. Revision for Geosytems 11/e is underway. He has proudly been a TAA member since 1989.