How do I call this CSS item in a wordpress sidebar?

[MulderDSM]

I've got some text boxes that I'm trying to place a picture in and the margins are always funky based on the over all CSS for the sidebar. I believe to fix this, I need to create a new style in the CSS, so I think I did this right:

#sidebar nostyle li a {
display:block;
line-height:160%;
padding:0px 0 0px 0;
color:#222;
background:#C0C0C0;
border-bottom:1px solid #464646;

But now I don't know how to call this, I tried this but didn't see any difference:
<span class="nostyle">#*$!xx </span>

Any advice is appreciated.

[swa66]

First, an element with attribute

<... class="nostyle">...</...>

should be selected in CSS with

.nostyle {
  ...
}

note the dot.

Read more about it here:
[w3.org...]