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Standard Manuscript Format

	A very high percentage of college graduates eventually write for publication.  Whether the writing consists of a company report or an article or book that will be evaluated and screened for publication, this means that the document you produce will have to be handled by several other people (including a copy editor and the printer).  This will in every instance involve a complex and exacting process.  How your document looks and how it is formatted are very important, not merely for aesthetic reasons, but because if will affect the editing and publishing process.  Note also that the file name you select when saving your file is critical: it should always start with your last name and first initial, with no punctuation, so the file can be saved and retrieved simply (e.g. LastnameF_personalnarrative.doc). 
	Please examine this page closely.  The author’s name and address appears in the upper left hand corner, single spaced, as part of the file itself.   This is a return address, not a header. This assures that if your printed document strays, it can be returned to you, or forwarded electronically to you.   Next you will notice that everything else is double spaced, and that nothing at all appears in the upper right hand corner of the first page (set header to different first page and leave it blank).   The title is centered and unmarked: no bold face or font change.   The right margin is ragged, not right-justified.
	The reasons are simple but compelling.  The area at the upper right is reserved for editorial instructions, either to you as the author, or to a copy editor or printer.  The spacing between words and lines should be uniform throughout.  In current document handling systems, your writing will probably be scanned optically or converted by typesetting software—which may be different from the program you used to produce the document.   Optical scanners respond exactly to the visual properties of your page.  If you change line spacing, fonts, or leading between lines, the OCR software will insert into the file a very long and irrelevant string of formatting marks, section breaks, style descriptions, and so on.  This increases errors and multiplies costs. The same is true if your computer file is to be converted to an in-house typesetting system.  It is critical to use standard software in your document—which means, in effect, Microsoft Word (DOC) or “Rich Text Format” (RTF), without exception.  Keeping the format simple and clean greatly reduces the technical editing that must be done to get your document into print.  For the same reason, do not put a cover page on papers you produce.  The editor wants to read what you write, not turn a useless page to find the beginning.  So too, avoid goofy fonts, nifty printed dingbats, clever little pictures, and all other such visual detritus.
	Above all, do not try to make your manuscript page look like something in a book.  It is going first to an editor, not the general public, who will pass it on to the printer.   Roughly 90% of editors (being human) are right handed, so the placement of your name on the first page and the headers all subsequent pages corresponds to how your printed document will actually be handled.   In some circumstances, you may be instructed by the editor to use an in-house “style sheet,” but that is one more reason to start from clean manuscript format, so that everything you have entered is consistent.  In such cases, you are your own editor: you don’t want to realize an hour before the deadline that the format of your document is inconsistent.
	For many inexperienced writers, the question of footnoting or documentation becomes a source of misplaced worry.  There are two general formats for documentation: the use of footnotes and the use of a works cited (or bibliography) section.  In the first, when you quote material from another source, such as these lines by William Blake, “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” the footnote appears at the very end of the quoted material, and the body of the footnote goes on the page below it.  Note particularly that you must NOT insert the footnotes at the bottom of the page manually.  All contemporary word processing software has an automatic, built-in feature that will insert the footnotes on the appropriate page in the right relative position, and allows changing between footnotes and endnotes or numbering styles, with just a few keystrokes.  The main reason to avoid manually inserting footnotes is that if an editor changes your text, the footnotes will not be connected to the page where the citation appears, but at the exact line where you originally inserted it. 
	If you were to use a works cited model (e.g. the MLA system which you will learn in this class) instead of footnotes, you would insert this instead (Blake 35) after the end of the quotation.  At the end of your document, under Works Cited, you would list all your sources by Author’s name and date of publication.  In either system, the same bibliographic information is required:  Author, Editor if any, Title, Place, Publisher and date.   It generally does not matter which system you use, so long as you are consistent and you facilitate checking your work. However, in this class we will be using the MLA formatting and citation system.
	In either system, the rule of reasonableness is that you should make it easy for your reader unambiguously to identify the source from which you quoted.  Your own practice should be as simple and consistent as possible.  In all systems, the titles of books are either underlined or italicized.  Essays, chapters in books, or poems are placed in “quotation marks.”  Whatever system you follow, do not proliferate useless footnotes, even when you want to relegate a point to a footnote so as not to break the flow of the main text.   In the example above, the footnote informs the reader that future references will be incorporated in the text, and therefore the essay does not require more footnotes.  Thus, if I quoted Blake from the same text, “Exuberance is Beauty” (37) no one will be confused, and there is no need for another footnote.    
	In every case, if you do not make it possible for your reader to check your sources, you are asking for serious trouble, including accusations of carelessness, distortion, dishonesty, or worse.  Without full bibliographic information, the reader cannot be sure of finding what you quote exactly where you say it is.  A secondary reason for paying attention to this is that it requires you to go back and check yourself.  NEVER rely on your memory alone, and always view your manual notes with healthy suspicion.   
	You will observe that the specifications outlined here are vastly simpler than all the exceptions, weird cases, and cautions that you will find in handbooks such as The MLA Handbook, or The Chicago Manual of Style.  There is no need to get stupefied over where to put a period.  The general format here pertains to anything that will be edited. That includes instructors who are going to comment on and grade your papers.  Unless you are given a specific format to follow, use the manuscript format outlined here.  Don’t complicate the appearance of the page: make your thought more subtle, more complex, more precise.  The visible page itself should be uncluttered and clean.