Know How to Format Your Manuscript – Part 1

I started proofreading a manuscript a few days ago for my boss. When I opened the Word file, the first thing I noticed was the font, which was not Times New Roman. No problem, I thought. Easy-peasy. I figured I’d just change the font before printing out the manuscript since I prefer to read in Times New Roman. Changing font on a document is an easy “select all” change.

Lord have mercy! As soon as I changed the font to Times New Roman, other problems in the manuscript immediately jumped out at me, and I realized I was looking at the poorest formatting I’d ever seen on a manuscript. Word has a “show/hide paragraph symbol” feature which allows you to see hard returns and breaks. I always keep this on so I can see what’s happening in a document. Well, dozens of paragraph symbols marched across the page like soldiers advancing on the enemy line.

The author had put a hard return at the end of every line, obviously believing that this was the way to “get to the next line.” What’s a hard return? It’s when you hit the “Enter” key. A hard return is meant to be a paragraph break, not a line break. You don’t need to insert a line break. Word will automatically move your text to the next line when you type, so there’s no reason to hit “Enter” until you get to the end of your paragraph.

The next thing I noticed was that there wasn’t just one hard return at the end of every line, but two!  The author apparently knew her manuscript should be doubled spaced, and she was inserting the second hard return so that the text would jump not just one line, but two, thereby making the manuscript “look” double-spaced. Word has a provision for line spacing a document.

Then I noticed the other errors. The author had put spaces before and after her emdashes. In her dialogue, she’d also put a space between the sentence-ending punctuation and the quotation marks. She’d put two spaces at the end of every sentence instead of just one. For some new paragraph indents, she’d hit the space bar five times. And on and on and on.

Thank goodness for Word’s “find and replace” feature, which allowed me to correct most of the formatting errors easily. The hard returns, however, were a problem. I had to delete those one at a time. For a lengthy manuscript, it was a time-consuming chore that took quite a few hours.

Perhaps there are writers who believe that formatting and editing are the job of the publisher, not the author. Some publishers might be more forgiving than others, but don’t think that these things aren’t part of your job. They are! This author was lucky in that I corrected her mistakes for her, but she could have just as easily had the manuscript file returned to her with instructions to clean it up herself.

Ironically, the story in this case was quite good. It was a historical which demonstrated rich detail and obvious research. Clearly the author knew what she was doing in creating the setting, plot and characters, which made me wonder all the more how she could be so unlearned in the other phases of her writing.

In Part 2 I’ll give you a list of basic formatting guidelines.

~~Jaye