House Style Guidelines – Kube and the Islamic Foundation
What are house style guidelines?
Although publishing houses follow the standard authorities in grammar and style, they also have special rules and recommendations for their own publications. In the case of our publishing house and its imprints, we adhere to the dictionaries and grammatical and style reference works issued by the University of Oxford. We also have our own house style guidance as well, which reflects our focus on Islam and Muslim culture and civilization. Our guidelines are set out as rules and they also make some recommendations. While ours is quite long it is neither exhaustive nor comprehensive but it should be helpful in dealing with the most obvious issues.
Who are they for and why are they important?
Our house style guidelines are useful to writers, translators, editors, copyeditors and proof-readers in preparing a manuscript for publication. Their main purpose is to maintain consistency in matters like punctuation, spelling, capitalization, italicization, transliteration and so on. So that everyone involved in preparing the manuscript can avoid wasting time and effort in making corrections later on by understanding our house style rules from the beginning.
Are they set in stone?
The short answer is no because languages are living things and the rules of grammar and style change too. Therefore we will periodically update our house style guidelines, and the glossary attached to them, in particular to reflect the naturalization of Arabic and other languages used in Muslim-majority countries into the English language.
So please check the latest edition of our house style guidance below before starting any publishing project with us.
(Click here to download our house style guidelines).
