House style guides give pointers on general stylistic preferences: font and font size, margin sizes, colours, dictionary, not using italics for certain Latinisms in legal texts.

Style sheets are to record style decisions for a specific document: spelling sub-Saharan and southern Africa correctly and, in medicine, spelling microorganism as one word, not hyphenated, for example.

Another key difference between the two is that a client develops a house style, and the copy editor compiles a style sheet for a particular work and then submits it with the edited text.

For more information, click here for a PEG blog on the subject and click here for a useful explanation of the major style guides.

Our sister organisation, the CIEP, has an excellent roundup of resources here. You have to be a member to access most of their own style guides, but they also have links to others.

Published on: Feb 19, 2023 at 21:59  and modified on Feb 25, 2026

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