 

Meet the Style Nazi

So, you have delivered your manuscript. If you have had inklings from my previous post that editing involves more than a quick polish, you would be right.

Indeed, your manuscript might not even be ready for editing. Huh? Sorry, but there’s one person from editorial whom I failed to introduce you to in my last post. Meet the Style Nazi.

Any academic press that is at all serious will ensure that the books it publishes conform to scholarly conventions. In addition, most publishers have a house style that encapsulates these conventions and gives them a unique flavour. Such a house style might be only a page long (like the Notes for Authors you see in the back of scholarly journals) or so detailed that it requires a booklet to elaborate all the requirements. (The latter may seem excessive but this is nothing, of course, in comparison with the mother of all style guides, the Chicago Manual of Style whose latest edition weighs in at over 950 pages and in the hands of a crazed copy editor might well be a deadly weapon.)

Not all presses have a Style Nazi but, if they don’t, they are foolish. Editing costs are a significant post in publishers’ budgets. Anything that streamlines editorial work reduces costs and coincidentally results in a superior end product.

Essentially, then, before any copy-editing is undertaken, what the Style Nazi does is check your manuscript for conformity and completeness. Both are equally important because each in their different way have a big effect on how much work is involved in editing your manuscript and hence in how much it ends up costing.

If you take a look at the style guide for NIAS Press or most scholarly presses, some things are pretty obvious. For instance, your copy editor can hardly do a proper job if:

  • The font size is so small as to make reading difficult.
  • The margins around the text are too narrow to fit marginal comments and corrections.
  • The line spacing is too close to accommodate in-line corrections.
  • No page number is printed (meaning total chaos if the bundle of paper is dropped).

A manuscript with such obvious faults will be rejected immediately by any Style Nazi.

However, don’t expect her to restrict herself to the obvious only. Also coming under her scrutiny will be your conformity with the house style for things like:

  • spelling
  • italicization of foreign words
  • punctuation
  • numbering
  • date format
  • treatment of quotations, and
  • citation format.

Here, too, there is plenty of content issues for your manuscript to be rejected out of hand.

Nor is that all; just as important as conformity is the matter of completeness. This could be a subject all to itself but, briefly, the problem with most academic works is that they are complicated, multi-part entities. Version control is crucial (for instance, your publisher will not want to pay for a whole lot of editing only to hear that ‘Sorry, I wasn’t happy with Chapter 3 and have rewritten it’). As such, if everything isn’t delivered together, how can work on your book proceed without the project degenerating into chaos as ‘little extra things’ are delivered at later dates?

No, I am not exaggerating. Indeed, authors are notorious for wanting to make ‘little corrections’ right up to the point of printing (more about that later). But right now I am reminded of one of our authors who some years ago was pleased to announce that finally she was delivering her long-overdue manuscript. On the list of minor things still outstanding, however, was Chapter 7, which still needed to be revised.

In short, if you promised but fail to deliver a preface and four photos (the first not yet written and the latter so grainy they are unusable), then expect your publisher’s Style Nazi to land on you like a ton of bricks.

So, here’s a thought: why not ruin the Style Nazi’s day and make yours one of bliss – deliver a ‘proper’ manuscript, first time.

(Post #2 of the Editorial section of a lengthy series on the book production process, the first post of which is here.)

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