Many educational institutions and most publishers have a system for handling style issues (such as capitalisation, spelling, abbreviations, terminology and treatment of numbers) in printed and online materials. This system is called a house style. Using a house style increases consistency across documents, giving the materials developed by an institution a more professional presentation. It also decreases the amount of time a writer, keyboard operator or editor has to spend making new decisions or remembering previous decisions about style issues.
The house style of the School of Nursing & Midwifery should be used in the preparation of all written material in the School, including student study materials, web content, correspondence and marketing/publicity materials. Writers preparing manuscripts for publication will, of course, use the house style recommended by the publisher.
House styles are ‘living’ documents and should be added to and modified as language usage and needs change. Please send suggestions or questions about this document to the Learning Design and Development Unit. 

School of Nursing & Midwifery house style (PDF 370KB)

Using a style sheet

It is useful to develop your own style sheet in which you record style and usage decisions (spelling, hyphenation, treatment of numbers, proper nouns and so on) made about a document or set of documents. If writing in a team it is beneficial to co-develop and share the style sheet to maintain consistency and reduce editing and revision time. A style sheet may be hand- or computer-developed.

Download the SONM style sheet template (DOC 39KB) .