Style guides and style sheets

STYLE GUIDES

An editorial style guide ensures a standard for quality and consistency across a client’s written materials and is an essential resource for writers and editors, and anyone else involved in producing text. Basically, it’s a reference document (just like brand guidelines or design guidelines) containing decisions on points of literary style, spelling, grammar and semantics. Style guides are not specific to any project but give details of an organisation’s chosen editorial style in general.

STYLE SHEETS

An editorial style sheet is a (usually) short document which summarises the key editorial principles followed in a specific project. It should list all the important editorial decisions (spellings, hyphenation, Latinisms and other word choices where there are permissible alternatives) used during the copyedit to help the proofreader ensure the text is absolutely consistent before it’s published, drawing on content from the client’s editorial style guide. 

I can produce both style guides and style sheets for any client, but I usually charge for these as additions to the agreed editorial project fee.