House style, style sheets, and who approves the wording

We have no written house style. Is that a problem?

Not a fatal one, and it changes what the first pass produces. Without a written standard, an editor works from a named published manual, from the client's own recent documents, or from both, and records every choice made along the way.

Editors Canada's Professional Editorial Standards puts that record at the center of copy editing. Standard D2.1 asks the editor to "develop a style sheet, or follow one that is provided, to track, identify and consistently apply editorial style."¹ The examples it gives are abbreviations, treatment of numbers, vernacular usages, and choice of spelling convention.¹

Organizations that commission several documents a year usually find the style sheet becomes the house style by accumulation. After three or four projects there is a document that answers most recurring questions, and the arguments stop repeating.

What is a style sheet, and do we get a copy?

It is a working record of every editorial decision made on your document. A typical one covers preferred spellings, capitalization of internal terms, how numbers and dates are set, hyphenation, and treatment of job titles. It also lists the names of people, products, and places as your organization spells them.

Yes, it comes back with the file. A style sheet is more useful to the client than to the editor, since the editor already knows what is in it. The client is the one who will write the next document, and the next document is where the record earns its keep.

Where you already have one, sending it before the work starts saves a round of queries. Where an existing document is meant to be the standard instead, naming that document does the same job. A style sheet built on one project can be handed to a different editor on the next one without anything being lost.

Three different terms are used for the same thing across our documents. Which one wins?

That question is yours to settle, and an editor's role is to find every instance and put the choice in front of you. Standard D2.3 of the same publication describes the work as resolving "variations in terminology, logic and mechanics."¹

Terminology in a business document is rarely neutral. A term may be fixed by a contract, by a regulator's vocabulary, by a trademark filing, or by what the sales team has been saying for eleven years. None of those are visible in the file.

What comes back is a list: the variants, where each appears, and how many times. Once a decision is made, applying it across the whole document is mechanical and complete rather than piecemeal.

Long documents assembled over years accumulate these variants quietly. A product renamed in 2023 leaves its old name in the appendices, and nobody notices until a customer quotes the appendix back.

Should an editor fix small things silently or query every one?

Both approaches exist, and the useful arrangement is agreeing which is which before the work starts. Typographical errors, doubled words, and inconsistent spacing are normally corrected silently, because a comment on each one buries the comments that matter.

Anything that could change meaning is queried instead. A figure that disagrees with the same figure three pages earlier is a question. So is a defined term used outside its definition, a sentence with two possible readings, and a claim that has grown stronger between drafts.

Clients who want every change visible can have that, and it produces a heavily marked file. Clients who want a clean read plus a short list of substantive queries can have that instead. Saying which at the start is the only part that matters.

Who has final approval, and why does an editor ask?

Because in many organizations the answer is written into a rule rather than left to preference. Pharmaceutical manufacturing offers the clearest case. Under 21 CFR 211.100, written production and process control procedures, "including any changes, shall be drafted, reviewed, and approved by the appropriate organizational units and reviewed and approved by the quality control unit."²

Public companies operate a comparable routing for disclosure. Securities and Exchange Commission rules carry a definition of disclosure controls and procedures. They are controls designed to ensure that information required in an issuer's reports "is recorded, processed, summarized and reported, within the time periods specified in the Commission's rules and forms."³ The same definition covers accumulating that information and getting it to management in time for a disclosure decision.³

Where such a route exists, the edited file has to enter it at the right point and in the right state. An editor who does not know the route can deliver a beautifully consistent document that has to be re-approved from the beginning.

Who else needs to see the edited file?

Whoever your process says, and the answer affects how the file is prepared rather than merely who receives it. A document going to a legal reviewer is more useful with queries left in place. The same document going to a designer is more useful with everything resolved and the tracked changes accepted.

Asking for two versions is normal and costs nothing extra. A marked file goes to the people making decisions, and a clean file goes to the people making pages.

Circulating a document to several reviewers at once is where versions divide. One person holds the file and merges comments into it, and that is the version an editor should be working from.

Where six people have already commented separately, merging their files is a job in itself, and it is worth pricing as one. Reconciling contradictory instructions is not editing, and an editor cannot decide which reviewer outranks which.

What file format do you work in, and does the software matter?

Microsoft Word is the practical standard for editing, because tracked changes and comments survive being passed between people. Google Docs works for the same reason. Editing directly in a design file, a slide deck, or a PDF is possible and is slower, and changes there are harder for a reviewer to see.

A document that will end up in a template or a design tool is usually best edited before it gets there. Text edited after layout has to be re-flowed, and every late change risks a new line break in the wrong place.

Slide decks are the common exception. Presentations are usually edited in place, because the wording and the amount of room on the slide constrain each other, and a rewrite that will not fit is no help.

Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, whatever format it arrives in.

Will we get tracked changes, and can we reject them?

Tracked changes come back by default, and every one of them is a proposal rather than an instruction. Rejecting a change requires no explanation, and the file is yours.

Comments in the margin do the work that changed text cannot. They carry the reason for a change, the query behind a stet, and the observation that applies to a pattern rather than to one sentence, marked once instead of forty times.

An organization reviewing its first edited file often finds the volume of marks alarming. Most of them are commas, capitals, and hyphens. The substantive queries are usually a short list at the front, and working through that list first makes the rest quicker to accept in bulk.

Word counts the changes for you, which gives a sense of scale before anyone reads a line. A file with nine hundred marks and eleven comments is a normal copyedit rather than a rewrite.