We often think of style as being the mode and manner that make our work unique, but in publishing, style means something altogether different.

A style guide or style sheet is a list of rules for formatting manuscripts. Style is how to use commas or italics or slang in a manuscript. I have read in one editor’s blog that fewer than half of the people submitting stories actually read the style guides in their How to Submit pages. Less than half of the authors who want to get published bother to format their manuscripts properly or use an RTF file as an attachment. Ignoring the submission rules is usually good for an automatic rejection.

I was sent a link to the style guide for the magazine The Economist recently. The guide is nice and short and full of interesting stories about style. The economists is a very readable magazine, despite its dry subject matter.

Here is a style tip for Science Fiction Writers:

Always italicize the names of ships. For example The Enterprise, The Galileo, The Star Fox.

Read the magazine’s submission policy well. Sometimes they let you format the italics directly in the RTF file, but the RTF file has to be converted to html and unless you use the god-awful save-as-html in Word this is not easy. (MS Word adds horrible crap to the html when you save it as html). Most editors (especially for novels) require that you use underlining to indicate italics. If you have to submit in plain text use the asterisk *to indicate this section is in italics.* I like the asterisk (*) or [i] because I can search and replace in a text editor and never screw up the format.

Some editors may read this. How many people use acceptable manuscript formatting? What are your policies on formatting italics? J? Mark?

http://www.economist.com/research/styleguide