Style Sheets: A Writer's Good Friend

By Rolf Vellek

This feature discusses a tool, or methodology, that likely is among the most useful and productivity enhancing tools a professional writer can use. The use of style sheets certainly is one of the intermediate methods that anyone, whether a casual writer or a documentation specialist, can quickly benefit from. A writer can achieve tremendous timesavings working on multi-page publications and will demonstrate documentation savvy with a project that looks consistent and sharp.

I recently completed Portland Community College's Certification Program in Technical and Professional Writing. During the last term, I had a terrific opportunity to learn and extensively practice the use of styles in three courses, each with a different publication package: Microsoft Word, QuarkXPress, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) with HTML/Dreamweaver. This article focuses on the use of styles as used in Word, as it is the most universally used writer's tool. As well, understanding how styles are used in Word provides an excellent background for the methodology of styles sheets. The principles behind the examples are generally consistent among various publication packages.

Style Sheets Defined
A style sheet is a set of paragraph or character formatting specifications that can be applied to highlighted text. The scope of this article does not include comprehensive style guides (a much broader topic), but discusses the use of styles or style sheets for typographical purposes.

The Methodology of Styles and Style Sheets
The concept of style sheets dictates that similar elements of text should have consistently defined formatting. For example, the first level heading of a manual created in Word may be defined as follows:

14 point Arial italicized font
12 point line spacing above and below
0" indent from left
Border below text for entire paragraph

All of these formatting elements (and more) can be simply defined as a style called Heading 1. The example below demonstrates what this set of specifications would look like for Heading 1.

With the style defined within Word, the writer can simply highlight each instance of a first level heading in the document and assign it the Heading 1 style. Presto! The format defined is applied without having to assign it to each instance of a first level heading individually. Also, if a style is modified, all text to which it was applied is reformatted instantly and globally over the entire project document. One can certainly appreciate the tremendous timesavings in working with a 100-page document!

Benefits of Using Style Sheets
The benefit of using styles when creating documentation is not obvious at first, due to relatively greater up-front work. One must consider typographical elements such as font size, character spacing and line spacing and then define them in the software application being used. For example, in an open Word 2002 document, one will select Format®Style from the drop down menu in order to access the style sheet and create or change style definitions. Most publication packages assign a standard style by default, such as Word's normal style, for example, or the standard typography in HTML). However, anyone desiring greater control and a broader range of styles within a document will develop and manage a custom style sheet. That up-front work pays off in the long run in managing typography when the document or Web site has grown into dozens or hundreds of pages.

Tackling and understanding how styles are used in a software package alleviates common headaches. Nearly every Word user, and many a Dreamweaver developer, has experienced the sudden loss or change of formatting after completing a simple carriage return. Perplexed, the writer wonders, "What happened to my text?" Consistently using style sheets helps avoid this issue. As well, using the defining elements of line spacing before and after paragraphs alleviates the use of hard carriage returns for spacing between blocks of text. The writer gains more power in defining line spacing throughout the document and the result is a much more elegant looking and professionally managed document. Additionally, when creating documents collaboratively, using styles makes it easier for different collaborators to achieve a consistent look.

As a note to aspiring Web developers, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a standard defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, actually gives the Web designer a more powerful way to format type than what is available with standard HTML. To learn more about CSS, visit the Web Design Group's pages at http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css.

At the end of the term, I had used style sheets to build Web pages, to define text desktop publishing project layouts, and to complete a term-long documentation project in Word. Though I had not previously used style sheets, by the end of my course they not only proved their value to me, but I was using them habitually.

As extremely valuable tools, once practiced and put to use, style sheets allow writers to provide clear and consistent formatting throughout entire pieces of work, whether it be for manuals, articles, or entire Web sites.

Rolf Vellek recently completed the Certification Program in Technical and Professional Writing at Portland Community College. A former business professional, he is managing a career transition into the field. With additional Web experience he is pursuing contract and freelance writing and Web development opportunities. Rolf can be reached at rvellek@att.net.