I wrote the original version of my manuscript formatting guide in 1993, modeling it after a much older two-page guide I received from Damon Knight in 1985. Back in those days, even for those who'd made the switch to composing...  read

A reader writes to ask: I've been writing in Microsoft Works, which I believe is similar but not identical to Word. When I type an ellipse by typing three periods in succession, the program automatically compresses them together, rendering the...  read

A reader writes to ask: I read somewhere that if you format properly you should get 25 lines per page, but I consistantly get 24. So when I use Word to give me a word count on 141 pages, I...  read

A reader writes to ask: At the recent meeting of our local writers group we got involved in a discussion about formatting. Several of us were having problems with the header/footer and page numbering aspect of our word processing program....  read

A reader writes to ask: I had a quick question for you regarding header formatting for novel manuscripts. I'm trying to customize the autotext feature for headers to follow the example you gave: Author / Book Title / Page #...  read