CONSISTENCY is one of the most important things about your book. You don't want a reader to see something that takes them out of your writing and causes them to stop reading. That thing could be anything from a misplaced comma, a forgotten space, or an erroneous italics usage.

Why is this a problem? If the reader pauses due to formatting, they are reminded they are reading a book. It takes away from the immersive experience and the exotic trip you, as the writer, have taken your reader on. When they are brought back to reality by formatting, they get distracted from your story.

There's a simple solution to this problem: a consistent style guide.

A style guide states the rules of your formatting. Sometimes, these are explicit and literal printed rule books you might use to format a paper at school. Other times, your personal style guide is more of a habit or head cannon that you use to promote consistency in your writing.

Now you're going to ask me, The Elf Editor, "why do i need a style guide"? I'm not traditionally publishing my book, and I do NOT have time or money to hire an editor. I don't want to learn the Stuffy rules of some guide like The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS or otherwise) or some other silly style guide someone made me learn in school.

I agree. You don't need a traditional style guide. However, go back to the previous paragraph and tell me exactly how annoying the last paragraph was to read. Besides the grammatical errors, it was rife with italics, bold words, odd capitalization choices, and underlining. While this is an exaggerated paragraph, you can see how the inconsistency makes it stick out among the rest of this lovely page. While you can use these tools for emphasis, they should be used sparingly but consistently. There are good ways to use emphasis, but I think I'll save that for a chapter unto itself.

This isn't the only thing that needs to be consistent in your book. Capitalize the first word of each sentence and punctuate the ends. Make sure you have the same number of spaces between each word. Either commit to paragraph indentions (which Wattpad makes difficult) or do away with them entirely. I hate it when I paste the text into Wattpad, and it puts random spaces in a few paragraphs, but I always glance over the chapter before I push publish and remove them because any lack of consistency takes the reader out of your book. I even check to ensure all of my quotes are curly or straight because sometimes cutting and pasting messes that up.

I know this should all seem like common sense, however if your story lacks these basic consistency principals, the reader is more likely to get frustrated and close the book. The smoother the formatting, the easier the reader sinks into your story.

A few more consistency rules beyond basic sentence structure are grammar rules. When you make a personal style guide, you need to decide certain things. Spelling is one: Commitment to spelling words the same way every time. Another is the capitalization of proper nouns. This includes names, places, and sometimes brand names. If you do it the same way every time, it fades into the background, and then the reader can enjoy the product.

Consistency especially extends to how you use numbers, money, dates, times, etc. I follow CMOS rules of numbers personally. They include spelling out numbers under one hundred, with a few exceptions. I like this rule because readers aren't taken out of your story by numerals, which sometimes causes unnecessary emphasis. I don't see one problem with this. The reader is pulled out of the previous sentence if I say I don't see 1 problem with this.

If you have questions about numbers, drop them below. I'm happy to discuss different ways to use them in the text without being distracting. Sometimes, the only time I open my CMOS style guide is to make sure I formatted some poor, unsuspecting numbers correctly.

Let me know what you think of this chapter and how you use a style guide to maintain consistency. If you have any questions or ideas, don't forget to ask the editor @eliana_elf.

This is The Elf Editor signing off,

@eliana_elf