Grammar girl here, how do you know whether your business or school requires you to capitalize

a certain word, or to use a hyphen in this term or that?

Unless you've memorized a bevy of rules, you need to look it up somewhere.

Today's topic is the editorial style sheet, the perfect place where writers, editors,

publishing professionals, office workers, and students can find this kind of information.

An editorial style sheet delineates style standards a company or publisher prefers, so that

all written documents remain consistent.

For example, some companies want certain bullet styles to be maintained throughout documents.

Others have strong opinions on hyphens after prefixes like non.

The style sheet often lists topics alphabetically, or is broken down into sections such as formatting

and commonly used terms.

It can cover items such as whether or not to use a comma after the last in a series,

called the serial comma.

What words should and shouldn't be capitalized?

What terms and phrases should and shouldn't be used?

The spelling of commonly appearing names and titles of individuals and entities.

It can also include formatting guidelines such as when to use bold, when to use italics,

and whether to use a period at the end of each bullet in a list.

A style sheet shouldn't be an enormous document that tries to rival tomes like the Chicago

Manual of Style at 1026 pages, and Garner's Modern American Usage, which clocks in at

942 pages.

A style sheet should not, for example, explain the difference between affect with an A and

...