Prompt Chain: From One Sample Chapter to a Style Sheet to a Consistency Checklist

For Copyeditors and Proofreaders

Tools: Claude | Time to build: 1 to 2 hours | Difficulty: Advanced Prerequisites: the Level 1 project style sheet template prompt (this chain fills the same categories) and the habit of reading AI output against the page. The Word find strings in step 3 are plain text. Wildcards are optional and need the Level 3 Word wildcard guide.

What This Builds

A style sheet usually starts the slow way: you read the first chapter, keep a list as you go, and discover on page 80 that the author wrote "email" twice and "e-mail" once on page 3. This chain gives you a head start on that list, and it does so in three stages with a stop after each one.

First, Claude inventories one chapter as it stands: every name, spelling, number style, compound and capitalization choice, with counts and paragraph locations. Second, it sets that inventory against house rules you paste in, and drafts a style sheet in which every entry either cites your pasted rule or is marked REVIEW. Third, from the sheet you have corrected, it makes a checklist, a set of Word find strings for later chapters, and a short list of topics to query with the author.

Claude never edits the chapter. It does not decide a style question the rules leave open, and it does not check a fact. Your judgment is the gate at each checkpoint.

Before You Paste Anything

This chain is built for client text, so two questions come first.

May the text go into an AI tool at all? Many publisher contracts, freelance agreements and house AI policies now say whether an editor may put any of the author's text into an AI tool. Some forbid it, and some require you to disclose it. Check your contract or ask the managing editor before you paste a word of a real chapter. If the answer is no, the chain still works on your own material (your house rules and an existing style sheet) or on an invented sample like the one in this guide. You can practise on the sample and keep your real projects off the chat.

What are the tool's settings? Check whether your Claude plan uses chats for model training, and how long chats are kept. Look at the privacy settings in your account and the vendor's current policy. A free consumer plan can differ from a business plan.

What to strip. Replace the author and the title with codes ("Author A", "Title B") and remove anything that identifies a real person named in the text, such as a memoir's family members. Names inside the chapter that are part of the story are the hardest to strip, which is one more reason to keep real chapters out if the contract is unclear.

Prerequisites

• A Claude account. Currently Pro at $20/month, which also gives you Claude Projects for the days-later version
• Your client's house rules as plain text you may paste (or an invented set to practise with)
• One chapter at a time. Never the whole book in one go, because a long manuscript is beyond what a chat holds reliably

Total ongoing cost: the Claude subscription above. Nothing else is needed.

The Concept

Think of three sieves stacked on a bench. The first catches everything that appears in the chapter, rough and unjudged. The second holds the house rules and sorts the catch into "decided by a rule" and "needs a person". The third turns your decisions into tools for the next chapter. The grains never skip a sieve, and you stand at the bench between each pair.

The chain works because each prompt is small and its output is checkable. The inventory can be checked with Word's Find. The draft style sheet can be checked against the rules you pasted. The checklist can be checked by running the searches.

Build It Step by Step

Part 1: Prepare the Chapter

Open the chapter and add a paragraph label at the start of each paragraph by hand: P1, P2, P3. This is the location system Claude uses, and you will use it at the checkpoint. Do not change the wording. Work in a copy so the real file stays untouched.

Start a new Claude conversation for this chapter. If you will come back over several days, create a Claude Project, put the pasted house rules in its project knowledge, and keep the chain in that project. Otherwise one conversation is enough.

Part 2: Prompt 1, the Inventory

Paste this prompt, and then paste the labelled chapter where the square brackets are.

I am a copyeditor building a style sheet. Below is one chapter, with paragraphs labelled P1, P2 and so on. Do not edit, correct, shorten or rewrite anything in it. Do not tell me which form is right.

List every treatment in the chapter exactly as it appears, in these categories: names of people, places, terms and spellings, numbers (numerals versus words), times and dates, compounds (hyphenated, open or closed), capitalization choices, and punctuation and abbreviations.

For each entry give the exact text, how many times it appears, and the paragraph labels. When the same thing appears in two or more forms, put the forms on adjacent lines. Count carefully. If you are not sure of a count, write "count uncertain". Present the result as a table with the columns Category, Entry, Count and Paragraphs.

CHAPTER:
[paste the labelled chapter here]

Checkpoint 1. Do not go on yet. Open the chapter in Word, press Ctrl+F for the Navigation pane and search for each variant. Match the result count to the count in the table, and use the Match case option for capitalization variants. Pay most attention to the entries Claude marks "count uncertain" and to anything it missed. A chatbot misses names and miscounts small numbers, and it can drop characters, so character-level items (double spaces, quotation marks, dashes as typeset) belong to Word's Find and Replace and not to this chain. Correct the table by hand where the counts are off.

Part 3: Prompt 2, the Draft Style Sheet

Paste the corrected inventory table and your house rules in the places shown.

Below are (1) an inventory table from one chapter and (2) the house rules for this project. Build a draft style sheet from them, using these categories: alphabetical word list, capitalization, hyphenation and compounds, numbers and dates, names and places, abbreviations, punctuation choices, cross-reference style.

For every entry, use only the pasted house rules. If a rule decides the entry, write the form the rule calls for and quote or cite that rule by its label. If the rules do not cover the entry, or the chapter uses more than one form, write REVIEW and say in one line why. Do not use any outside knowledge of any style manual, do not name or number a rule from any manual, and do not invent a rule. Do not rewrite or edit the chapter text. Where the chapter uses only one form and no rule applies, list it as "single form, no rule".

INVENTORY TABLE:
[paste the corrected table here]

HOUSE RULES:
[paste the house rules here, each with a label such as H1, H2]

Checkpoint 2. Two jobs here. First, check every rule citation against the pasted rules: does H3 really say what Claude says it says? Second, decide every REVIEW item yourself. Use the house guide and the manual your client names. Read the rule in the manual itself, because chatbots misstate style rules and invent section numbers. Where the answer is the author's to give (a name's spelling, for example), keep it as a query. Then correct the style sheet by hand so it holds your decisions.

Part 4: Prompt 3, Checklist, Find Strings and Query Topics

Paste the corrected style sheet.

Below is a corrected style sheet for one project. Using only what it says:
1. Make a checklist of the decisions to look for in each later chapter, grouped by the sheet's categories.
2. List plain text strings to search for in Microsoft Word, one per line, for every variant form the sheet rules out or marks for checking. Give each string exactly as typed, and note if Match case or Find whole words only should be on. Do not use wildcards.
3. List, one line each, the topics where the sheet still has an unresolved inconsistency and the author should be asked. State the places and the question. Do not write the query itself, and do not suggest an answer.
Do not add rules, do not edit chapter text, and do not state any style manual's rule.

STYLE SHEET:
[paste the corrected style sheet here]

Checkpoint 3. Run each find string in Word on the chapter and check that the hits are what you expect. Fix any string that finds nothing it should or finds too much. Write the author queries yourself, in your own words and tone, and paste them into Word comments. The Level 1 query prompts can help you word them, but you read and send each one.

Part 5: Repeat for the Next Chapter

Use the corrected style sheet as the standing reference. For chapter 5, run prompt 1 again. Then in prompt 2 paste the inventory, the house rules and the current sheet, and ask Claude to list only what is new or changed. Do each chapter in its own pass. If the sheet grows long, keep the working version in the Claude Project and your master copy in Word.

Real Example

This sample chapter is invented, about 135 words, written for this guide. "Title A" is a made-up book and none of the people is real. It carries deliberate variants.

P1: At six o'clock the bakery on Harbour Street was already warm. Mrs. Okafor, the owner, checked the ovens while her niece Dana set out twelve trays of rolls. By 7 a.m., the first customers had arrived, and by seven thirty the line reached the door.

P2: Ms. Delgado, well known for her early starts, wanted two loaves. Mrs Okafor greeted her by name. "Your usual?" she asked.

P3: Tom, the delivery driver from the Harbor Street depot, left 12 crates by the back door and sent an e-mail to confirm. Later Dana answered by email and copied the Board.

P4: The bake shop closed at noon. The accounts for the bakeshop were checked each Friday by the board, and a well-known critic praised the rye.

P5: Dana wrote the totals in a green notebook, and Mrs. Okafor signed each page.

Prompt 1 result (a typical shape, yours will differ).

At checkpoint 1 you search the chapter in Word: "Okafor" gives 3 hits (2 plus 1), "Dana" gives 3, "email" without the hyphen gives 1 and "e-mail" gives 1. Match case distinguishes "Board" from "board", one hit each.

Invented house rules for the prompt 2 paste. These are made up for this example and are not any manual's rules.

• H1: Use US spelling for common words.
• H2: Spell out whole numbers zero through ten. Use numerals for 11 and above.
• H3: Write email without a hyphen.
• H4: Hyphenate a compound modifier that comes before a noun.

Prompt 2 result (a typical shape).

Your decisions at checkpoint 2 (invented for the example). Keep the period after Mrs, because you read the manual the client names. Use "bakeshop" closed. Leave the time forms as written. Query the author on the street name and on Board versus board.

Prompt 3 result (a typical shape).

• Checklist: email without hyphen (H3), numerals for 11 and above (H2), compound modifier hyphenation (H4), the period after Mrs, bakeshop closed.
• Find strings: "e-mail" (find whole words only off), "Mrs " followed by a space (finds the form without the period), "bake shop", "twelve", "Harbour", "Harbor", "Board" with Match case on.
• Query topics: street name spelling, Harbour (P1) against Harbor (P3). Board (P3) against board (P4), same body or not.

You run the searches in the next chapter, write the two queries in your own words and send them in the usual way.

Time saved: the first-pass list of treatments for a chapter becomes a table to check, not a list to compile from scratch. You still read every line of every output.

What to Do When It Breaks

• The counts disagree with Word. Trust Word. Correct the table by hand before prompt 2, because every later stage inherits the error. If counts are often off, split the chapter in two and run prompt 1 on each half.
• Claude cites a rule that is not in your paste, or names a manual's section. Delete the entry and ask again, repeating the instruction to use only the pasted rules. Never copy a rule from a chat reply into your sheet without reading it in the manual itself.
• Claude decides something it should have marked REVIEW. Treat any entry without a rule citation as REVIEW and decide it yourself.
• Claude starts rewriting sentences. Stop, delete the output and restate that the chapter text must not be edited. Never paste an AI rewrite into the manuscript.
• The conversation gets long and the answers drift. Start a fresh conversation, or use a Claude Project, and paste only the current sheet.
• The find strings miss variants. Add them by hand. A chatbot cannot see typeset characters such as curly versus straight quote marks, so those checks stay in Word.

Variations

• Simpler version: run only prompts 1 and 2 on your own existing style sheet, with an invented sample, to see how the sheet compares with a chapter.
• Extended version: after the Level 3 wildcard guide, add wildcard patterns to the find strings, and test each on a copy first.

What to Do Next

• This week: practise the whole chain on the invented chapter in this guide, then on a chapter of your own material if your contracts allow it.
• This month: keep one corrected style sheet per project and carry the checklist into each new chapter.
• Advanced: combine with the Level 3 Claude Project that checks a word list against an existing sheet.

Advanced guide for Copyeditors and Proofreaders. AI tools change often, and chat behaviour varies between sessions. Check every output against the chapter, your house rules and the manual your client names.