ellen_datlow | A rant on proper manuscript formatting

Recent reading and editing has brought to my attention the fact that some writers have suddenly (well, since using computers and email) decided that the usual rules of mss preparation are no longer necessary.

Three examples:
1) I have received print submissions without PAGE NUMBERS (not often, but still, this should never happen).

2) I have increasingly been the recipient of manuscripts that don't underline words meant to be italicized in the story's final, printed form. The reason editors/copy editors/and whoever does the production on a mss need to see underlines is that some typefaces don't show italics very well, and even if they did--it's quicker to "see" underline than italics

3)I have been receiving mss without anything indicating space breaks. What happened to ###? I'm in the middle of reading a printout that seemed to be missing at least two pages because there were no transitions...When I checked the efile, lo and behold, the sentence breaks were in different places so I could actually see that there were supposed to be space breaks. Writers--new and pro--please please show your space breaks by putting in hash marks.

4) Paragraphing--before online publishing, paragraphing was shown by indenting margins...Guess what, folks? Most publishing (especially of books) is still print, which means that paragraphs are indented.

Rant over

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(from Steve Tem)

I feel your pain. Just to give you an author's perspective, I've gotten notes from more than one copy editor lately asking me to convert my underlines to italics throughout. And more than one editor has asked me not to use underlining in submissions. I assume this is because more publishers are using electronic copies, but I hate the trend. My eyes have a hard time distinguishing courier italic--it gets confusing.

This is true. I've had many editors tell me not to underline and that ### means the end of the story, not paragraph breaks. The "standard" formatting is now so muddled I get afraid to submit anything, because I'm going to end up screwing up without realizing it. (I get over it.) Now I go solely by the submission guidelines - if it doesn't say to underline italics, I don't. Particularly since in some of my work, flashbacks are in italics, so you'd have pages and pages of underlined material - that could get really old fast.

I get how this can be annoying, though.

There is no excuse for not numbering pages.

Hi Steve,
Well, the first thing I do when working on an e-file (if I'm editing a story, I read the print out first then I cut and paste from that word file) is change the format to times roman 12 point and put the page numbers in the upper right hand corner. That's what I'm used to, and I like it.

That seems weird to me--why would they do that? Seriously. Unless they don't edit the mss...

I don't want to be a killjoy, but having pages and pages of italics OR underlines is not such a great idea. I don't like to read pages of italics in a finished work-novel or story.

Personally, I'm mindboggled that people apparently aren't indenting paragraphs. I need to figure out how to make Word page number things by default, because I always forget.
We had the ### debate in my fiction writing class last semester, and the conclusion people came to was that you should do it if the break happened to be at the end of the page, otherwise just leave a line or two of white space. I disagreed because I assume that empty white space means the author accidentally hit the spacebar, not that it's a break in text.

Please let them know that leaving a line or two is very very bad--your reasoning is exactly right--why would a writer do something that COULD be misunderstood instead of something that couldn't be misunderstood? My mind boggles as well.

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