styleletter

A styleletter is a concise document used in publishing and media production to specify editorial style preferences for a particular project. It complements formal style guides by focusing on project-specific choices and exceptions, and may be referred to as a style memo or project style note.

Purpose and scope: It helps editors, writers, designers, and fact-checkers stay aligned by clarifying conventions on spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations, numbers, dates, measurements, and typography, as well as the desired tone, audience, and stance.

Typical contents: It may cite the base style guide (for example, AP or Chicago), list deviations or exceptions, define preferred spellings, hyphenation rules, treatment of foreign terms, capitalizations, italicization, citations format, date formats, and layout rules for headlines and captions. It can include examples.

Creation and use: usually authored by an editor or editorial director, updated as needed, and distributed with the project brief or stored in an internal wiki. Writers consult it during drafting; editors refer to it during edits.

Relationship to other guidelines: A styleletter is more concrete and project-focused than a general style guide, and it may be superseded by a formal style sheet or the base publication's guide. See also: style guide, editorial style, style sheet.