*Having been an editor, I know that some formatting is important. You need to be able to read the submission without battling for the information through a Horror Font or asterisks galore. However I know what Doctor Roberts is talking about. This is different. I’ve said before that gatekeepers get so jaded they lose track of what good stories are. Which is why they start hanging inflexibly on crazy stuff. I once read an interview with a major professional editor — back in the nineties — who said that he hated word processing because it made everyone look the same and he “couldn’t tell who is good.” Now, not to brag, but I usually know who is good after three paragraphs, even if it’s written in crayon on wax paper. I don’t propose that people should send crayon on wax paper stories, but to hang up on minor formatting issues is also insane. The other part of this is ageism. In a case of thinking they’re Hollywood, they think they need young writers to appeal to young readers, which is insane — not only do we not read by age, but most young readers aren’t looking for writers their age. The way they’ve found to discriminate against those forty and older is to say that pieces with two spaces after the period aren’t acceptable.*
I have a bone to pick…
As a fiction writer, I admit that I’m still very much in the wannabe stage. I am not yet published in Science Fiction/Fantasy, although I have been submitting short stories to various contests for a few years now. I recently started submitting to the two big magazines – Analog and Asimov’s. As expected, to date I have received only rejections. That’s ok, I’m learning what they don’t want as I go along. I have no great expectations about getting published in my first or early tries, therefore I shall muddle on, keep writing and keep submitting.
Still, I have a bone to pick.
You see, I am not truly a novice at writing. I am a scientist – and not just a theoretical or practical spend-all-day-at-the-lab-bench type, but the I’ve-written-over-100-published-articles-20-book-chapters-and-25-years-worth-of-grant-applications type. I know how to write, how to speak, and how to use all of the tools that people of all professions use for writing.
Oh sure, you can say “but writing Science is not the same as writing Science Fiction” and I’d agree with you. I have a blog in which I am attempting to explain brain science to writers (and readers) of Science Fiction. I try to take the technical information and remove a lot of the jargon and details that require a PhD just to read. I have been told I do a decent job of explaining, even though I was recently criticized by a press officer for not making my explanations understandable at a 7th-8th grade reading level. Guilty as charged. I write science for the public at about high school graduate/first-year college level, and for people who don’t mind looking up the occasional term for further understanding.
But writing for the “common audience” is a different mind-set for me. So much so that I find I cannot switch back and forth between writing scientific articles or grant applications and writing SF/F (or my blog). If I am going to write for 2-4 days on a short story, I cannot read, write or even review scientific papers. Once I drop into the “public” writing mode, I dare not do any of my professional writing or I risk using inappropriately casual structure and colloquial language. This is less of a problem when writing my blog, since the material is still science-related, but I still have to be careful when I switch back to work-related writing.
That’s not the issue I have, though. I admit that my fiction writing is probably still not up to the standards of certain authors and publications, and I have much to learn about the craft of writing. I also freely admit that I have not necessarily been writing exactly what those magazines may be looking for. My stories tend to be at the long end of “short story” and I’ve been all over the place with genre as I try to experiment with my writing.
No, I don’t have a problem with rejection. My issue is with something else in the rejection letter. Several of the letters have included the comment:
“In the future, we’d appreciate it if you formatted the story in standard manuscript format (SMF). You can find out more about SMF here: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html”
My first reaction was “How could this be? I did format the manuscript as if it came off of a 50 year-old Royal typewriter! I did leave space above the title for those hypothetical handwritten notes from editor to typesetter, and I even included a word count and page number/title/author heading at the upper right (must be the right not left, because it may be clipped in the left) corner.
What was my crime? My infraction that may bring down the wrath of editor and industry upon my head? Was it the fact that I forgot and used my pen name in the heading, and not my real name? Was it that fact that I used “Courier New” instead of just plain old Courier monotype? As I read further, I discovered my crime.
I am guilty of inappropriate punctuation.
I learned to type on a typewriter and still tend to put two spaces after a period or colon. I use dashes in my text – somewhat like this – and I put spaces around them. In my defense, when using just about any proportionally-spaced font, my word processor will not automatically convert double or stand-alone hyphens to em-dashes unless I do put spaces around the character. My usage of three asterisks on a line by themselves to indicate a break in the story is yet another infraction, instead I should have been using a single centered hash mark:
#
There are a couple of other minor details that I may have missed, but they are all just that… minor. I have been unable to find any major infractions in the stories I have submitted. I am thus left with the conclusion that my infractions have been minor. However, it also leaves me with the vague fear that if I do not correct these stylistic differences I may be labeled as unteachable (or worse yet, intractable) by the editors to whom I submit my manuscripts.
Mind you, I know something about the preparation and review of manuscripts. In 30 years I have written all or part of 100 articles that are published in scientific journals (about 10,000 to 15,000 words each). For the past 25 years, not a year has gone by that I have not written at least one grant application for submission to National Institutes of Health or other funding agency. During at least half of that tenure, I have also been a reviewer of such grant applications. Each application runs about 35,000 to 50,000 words in length and they are a veritable pain in the posterior to write and to review. Whereas an academic researcher such as I may write 1-to-3 grant applications a year, there is also the potential to review 10 applications (by invitation) for a single NIH review meeting (of which there are three per year). That’s the equivalent of 3-5 novel-length manuscripts read and commented upon in the course of about two weeks. A typical committee reviews a minimum of 75 applications per meeting, and there are currently 200 committees reviewing applications at a rate equivalent to 24,000 novel-length submissions to NIH. NIH has several standards for readability – Arial or Georgia 11-point fonts, they scan better. There are length, margin and line spacing standards. The reviewers need to write notes all over a grant application – yet all applications are single spaced because of length concerns. Surprisingly, NIH has found that monospaced fonts are harder to read than proportionally spaced fonts. I guess those dumb NIH reviewers just don’t know all the tricks that fiction editors can teach them!
Not that I have not even gotten into the numbers and perspective of writing scientific articles, but many of the same In scientific review, we do have those reviewers who pay close attention to the formatting details of a submission. We have a phrase for that – we call it “inappropriate attention to irrelevant details” and a reviewer either learns to pay attention to the appropriate aspects of the manuscript at hand, or they are no longer sent material to review.
As both a scientist and a writer, I find there is equal irritation with myself for failing to realize that there are certain formatting standards that I am failing to acquire – but I am also irritated with an industry that still adheres to a formatting style that is at least 30 years out-of-date (since the advent of the IBM Selectric and digital printers). With all of the discussion these past few months about changes in the publishing industry and failure to adopt appropriate business models, I find this to be a most egregious example of the “gatekeeper” mentality that Sarah Hoyt, Kris Rusch, Amanda Green and others have written about in recent months.
I do understand the need for a consistent format for readability, and I can certainly acknowledge that there is a standard format to which editors are accustomed. But if a writer has adopted a readable style, should they be scolded for missing the details, especially when those details are irrelevant to the story? Perhaps it’s just me and those of you reading this rant will tell me I’m wrong. But I don’t think so…
…And I personally have over a million words in print on my side of the argument.
Here’s the link to Dr. Roberts’ blog:
http://teddysratlab.blogspot.com/
According To Hoyt 
Dr. Roberts,
When Sarah gives you a soapbox like this, and you mention your blog, pleeeeease link to it! It sounds like something I would enjoy and learn from, but only if I know where it is!
Yes – please put up your url. I would like to see your blog too. Also I have been writing for a few years and quit submitting to magazines and traditional publishers because I was not happy with the rejections. Only one (Sci-fi and fantasy mag) gave me any instructions and it was that they wanted to see more of my writings, but the one I sent was not something they would print. 😉
I was in college at the time and didn’t have the time to write fiction as much (all those academic papers).
Really enjoyed this post–
OK, First off – WordPress hates me – I tried to comment and it told me that I wasn’t who I said I was, then it deleted my comment. I’m trying again…
I appreciate the responses and sorry about not providing a link to my blog. When we write guest posts for Sarah, she doesn’t actually “give us the keys” but rather we write and send to Sarah for posting. She *does* have my blog listed in her sidebar under “Unindicted Co-conspirators” but I agree it may be hard to find.
So here it is: http://TeddysRatLab.blogspot.com.
Thanks for reading!
WordPress doesn’t hate you. WordPress hates everybody … which, yes, includes you, but it’s nothing personal.
Spot on. We’re endlessly lectured that it’s all about Story, and not about mechanics. Gatekeepers can spot a good story very rapidly, and to return the submission for formatting issues is beyond asinine.
I remember once when a bunch of us writers got together at a conference and discussed our legion of rejection letters. We discovered that many of them were full of excuses and lies. One agent’s “standard format” differed from author to author. One editor said that a project set in one country was okay, but another one was not–and that same year her house acquired a three book series set in no-no land.
So why, do you think, so many of us are going indie? It’s junk like this that has us fed up, and that’s before we even mention proper compensation.
I get frustrated over this, too. I tend to use two spaces. Most of the manuscript formatting advice says “use one or two spaces after a period, but be consistent in your usage.” I do this. And sometimes get rejected over penny-ante stuff like this, just as S2LA has reported.
I know when I’ve read slush (for the defunct Written Word Online Magazine, and now for Fantastic Frontiers), I will mention if I think something is egregious, but I still look at _story_ first. (For me, an egregious thing is a well-known word spelled in a really odd way that’s not a typo, such as “brail” for “Braille.” I mention this is wrong and needs to be edited, then I talk about the story itself. If the story is good enough despite this, I’ll still recommend it.)
IOW, I’m in full agreement with Mrs. Hoyt, Amanda S. Green, and anyone else along with S2LA who thinks this is asinine. Because it is.
I think it is like short hair and a silly walk in the military. They assume that if you aren’t obedient on the small stuff, you won’t be obedient on the big stuff either. Things like having the appropriate ideological slant or subtext.
They don’t just want sellable authors. They want sellable and compliant authors.
Compliant, yes. That, too, is part of the problem. Compliant authors don’t complain about bad practices.
The compliant also are less likely to ask awkward questions about contracts and sales statements, no?
They also don’t throw fits over requested revisions.
Which is not exactly an insane desire on their part.
Ah, but the short hair and the silly walk have good reasons for compliance – ease and speed of maintaining hygiene, and efficiency of moving groups of people coherently and quickly. Unless the editors want to weaponize their authors, there’s not a reason….
…
Nah, Baen wouldn’t weaponize their authors. And if the other houses tried, Baen would weaponize so fast it’d be like picking a war with Israel. Not to mention the amount of tactics and weaponry, orthodox or not, the allied barflies would come up with…
Baen doesn’t HAVE to “weaponize its authors” – they do that themselves. Baen just acknowledges the status quo and accepts it as a given.
Yes. Even I am weaponized, even if the weapons tend to be “whatever comes to hand” rather than standard.
I think that the phrase, “There are no such things as dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous people” would apply to Baen authors more than pretty much any other identifiable subgroup not defined by military training. And frankly, they’d probably beat some of those.
True. I should have chosen some less useful customs like having to have your belt buckle on the left (or the right, I don’t remember anymore), or the exact angle of the hat.
Here’s the link to Dr. Roberts’ blog:
http://teddysratlab.blogspot.com/
Sorry, I should have done that, but I posted it REALLY early in the morning and was sadly lacking in caffeine. I shall do an update.
Speaker, if I might ask an off the wall question? I’ve always seen “lab rats” presented in the press and entertainment as a stereotype of albino, or all-white with black eyes – but the rats on your blog and your avatar are a muddle of white and brown. What do actual, real, in the lab rats look like?
In truth, all of the above. The albino lab rat – Rattus rattus – is one bred for specific genetics (i.e. they are “inbred”), but the side effect was that they are effectively blind to color, or for any vision longer than 1/2 to 1 meter. Common strain names for those rats are “Sprague-Dawley strain” “Fischer-344 strain” or “Wistar-Kyoto strain.” The behavioral tests I use require much greater vision capability, therefore we use one of the “outbred” strains that are periodically bred with wild rats (which tend to be brown or black – the “Brown Norway strain”). Mine are called “hooded Norway” rats – Rattus norvegicus – and go by the strain name of “Long-Evans strain” or “Lister-hooded” strain. For most behavioral experiments the hooded Norways are much healthier, they live longer, can see better, and in many cases learn faster.
Huh! So Pinky and the Brain are colorblind, and nearsighted? This explains… something.
Brown Norway rats I know – or at least, I know the lengths to which ship owners go to try to keep them off vessels. Clever, persistent big buggers!
Thanks!
Pinky and the Brain are mice, not rats, but that pedantic perambulation aside, yes, they probably are both colorblind and nearsighted for reasonable values of the terms. 🙂 Although I’m sure the Brain at least just wills himself to have whatever level of vision is required for his latest scheme.
Somewhere along the line I got the peculiar idea that formatting for printing was something editors (or unpaid interns) did. An author’s job was to present, in comfortably readable format — double-spaced, printed one side only, decent margins, no dot matrix — stories and material that people might pay money to read. You know: authors provide charcters and story, editors prepare for publication.
Whatever was I thinking!
also – the formatting has changed since I first started writing in the 80s. 😉
Somehow, if a previously unknown short-story collaboratively written by Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard (or a RAH/Doc Smith collaboration, or RAH/Louis L’Amour or L’Amour/Bradbury … build your own) were unearthed I doubt formatting issues would prevent its publication. It could be written in runny ink on a stack of cocktail napkins and editors would still fight for the publishing rights.
As the lady said, turning down the gentleman’s advances: It’s an excuse.
I need to wash my hair tonight… you mean? Yes, editors seem to have some ready excuses. To be fair, not all of the stories are very good. I see that a lot on a website that I do some grammar editing. But people are learning to tell stories. I think that is a good thing.
“I am sorry, but your submission does not meet our current requirements.” Is ample explanation.
“We don’t like your formatting.” … is akin to telling you “she was in the arms of a cousin who was back from over seas”
It shouldn’t be necessary to change your own writing preferences. Seems a simple script or macro (er, assuming you’re not still using a Royal typewriter) could easily reformat those trivialities for submission. It’s not hard for a script to replace three astericks with a centered hash, for instance. Ditto cleaning up a “two spaces” habit.
The classic horror story floating about the aspiring writers circle is of the aspiring writers who are assured at the con that the house is not pedantic about their submission packages, that you don’t have to worry about whether your prologue counts toward your first three chapters.
Then said house rejects the package the aspiring writers send in for not comforming to their requested package of stuff.
Mind you, the aspiring writer might have taken it as license to run amok, and I think I’ve heard it told in the first person, but I wouldn’t swear to it on the witness stand. I certainly don’t remember it being attributed to a particular publishing house. But there’s a reason why it floats about. (I once told that story to an editor at a publishing house, and he was surprised to hear it.)
I confess to being on a one-person crusade to saving the double-space after the period. At work, I tell the young that if they are writing something that will be read by someone over 40, they should use two spaces because our brains will be convinced there is something wrong with what we are seeing. Is it their logic? Their research? What? We’ll have this weird nagging feeling, and it won’t be to their benefit. Don’t judge me: it seems to be working.
In the fiction context, after reading this post, I am now the one with the paranoid anxiety. I literally cannot stop the two-spaces. My thumbs do it on their own.
Word processing programs automatically double-space* after a period, unless over-ridden (and sometimes even then.) It is a minor feature and largely irrelevant. Complaining about it is akin to grousing that a book uses British spellings for such words as glamour, honour and colour. It is an easily correctable matter that should in no way preclude publication. Even if the editor doesn’t want to use an intern on the task, it is an easy matter to return the draft to the author with instructions as to how to revise the draft to make it suitable. It is NOT sufficient cause to decline an otherwise excellent submission, nor is it a credible reason for so declining.
It is rudeness, like telling an obvious lie when a harmless deflection or flat truth would suffice. As Cyn suggested, it is saying “I have to wash my hair that night” when “I think of you as a brother” or “I have no interest in you romantically” are more accurate. Or, if you prefer: “I’m going to be sick that night” as reason for not accompanying you to your great-aunt’s birthday.
*By double-space I mean “extend a single space so as to appear to be a double-space.
Clarifying & simplifying (translation: I walked off and had a cuppa coffee.)
What rankles is not that the editor feeds you a lie, it is that they feed you an obvious and bad lie and you have to swallow it. It is an abuse of power and position.
Yes. This is part of what has always rankled.
Actually, no they don’t. What they do is use proportional spacing between letters. The reason for the double space after a period was to make it clear a sentence was ending, proportional fonts mean it’s a waste.
And Speaker, please direct me to someplace I can explain to those idiots that spaces before and after hard dashes are considered proper in everything from AP style (what everyone should use IMO) to MLA and APA.
Morons.
Quibble quibble quibble, Patrick. The proportional spacing between a period, a space and an upper case letter translates into the equivalent of a double space. Tomayto, tomahto.
Hey I’m an editor, they pay me to quibble!
Well, I didn’t pay you! But if we meet at a con I’ll buy you a beer.* 😉
It struck me as I was hitting the “Post Comment” button that you had described the mechanism while I was describing the effect.
*Offer limited to on tap or bottled regular menu brews only. You want a beer made with hops gently crushed by rolling between the breasts of virgins, you pay the upcharge.
Somewhere out there, there are hopped-up virgins making beer?
Actually there are in a lot of virgins making beer, since it’s a common past-time in monasteries; it’s just the virgin’s breasts wouldn’t be the type the initial poster was probably envisioning. (Which isn’t to say that all monks are virgin’s but it’s not unheard of either.)
Oh, they know that’s so. But most publishers (that I’m aware of, as a reader of primarily SF / Fantasy) don’t use those formats. Some literary / memoir publishers use the “space before hard dash, space after” format.
I suspect the main reason minutia like this matters is because once a story is chosen, the editors will ask for an electronic copy, and then that will go into the magazine with perhaps an editor / copy editor reading it over to correct errors as the story gets formatted to fit and to look pretty.
Could be wrong about this, of course, but I really do think that’s what is going on. Perhaps someone knows more about this than I do?
The key point here is “once a story is chosen” — until that stage the formatting trivia is irrelevant. Once a story is chosen it is reasonable to make the selection conditional upon providing “an electronic copy” suitable for publication, according to the following formatting …
Failure to provide a publishable electronic copy is just cause for revoking acceptance of a story, but it is an absurd reason to reject the story in the first place. Formatting issues only reach necessary and sufficient cause for rejecting a story when they involve such egregious deficiencies as no margins, single-spaced, both sides of the paper, 7th carbon levels.
Mind, ANY reason is sufficient for slush-pile submissions — which makes stupid reasons all the more insulting. “Thank-you for your submission, but we are not currently accepting unsolicited material” is more than adequate and minimally polite — anything less is stupidly rude.
I prefer the double space at the end of sentences, it does look better to these eyes. I am not sure if it is the result of years of training, or the fact that it, along with the punctuation, helps to clearly set an end to a sentence. It brings to mind the difficulty of trying to decipher from photos of old Koine manuscripts which were written lacking breaks for anything, including words.
Double spacing was drummed into me in touch typing class, so like many in my generation my fingers do it automatically.
I don’t do the double spacing anymore. My English Lit professor broke me of it. 😉 The space before and after a dash? MLA doesn’t use it. I think it maybe used in AP or Chicago style. (Unless MLA has changed since I was in school in 2001.)
I’m just a young sprout, not yet 40, and I was taught to double space after a period. In fact, until I took Amanda’s self-publishing workshop I had never heard of single spacing after a period, although I did know that certian word processing programs automatically adjusted the single into a double (looking) space. I just assumed they added the space, like the way some of them automatically fix spelling errors when you invert ie to ei in a word.
Bearcat I am in the over-50 crowd now. 😉 and it was a requirement when you banged out your term papers on a manual typewriter. You could get dinged for it. I had to consciously tell my thumb to hit the spacebar two times. I am glad not to do it anymore unlike others here.
“inappropriate attention to irrelevant details” – and that is an accurate description of about 99.99% of my frustration with military staff work.
Good grief, and I thought academic press format requirements were nit-picky. At least there the rules boil down to “if Chicago doesn’t specify, pick something understandable and stick with it.” And even then they at least try and read your submission (unless you send in a genre or subject area on their “we do not accept, really, we are not kidding, don’t waste your postage money” list.)
They don’t like double spaces at the end of sentences? And think it’s old-fashioned and obsolete? Huh? When I was in high school I was taught that that was the proper way and would have received red ink for *not* doing it. Heck, since I’m still in college, I have no doubt that they *still* teach paper formatting like that (at my high school, at least).
I was at my very first pipe club meeting (if you’re not a member of a pipe club, join one…now) when I discovered a couple of the guys I was chatting with over excellent tobacco and brandy were English profs. I broached this very topic as a way to break the ice, as I was the new guy and they nearly tore each other’s heads off.
Metaphorically, of course, but it was still bloody.
A pipe club? Really? What kind of pipe do you like? I know that PVC is all the rage now, and some purists prefer copper, but I find that for good, old-fashioned wet work there’s nothing like lead pipe.
I’m partial to the Pan pipe myself. The pipe that comes with a plaid haggis attached, however, is an offence against nature.
Zamfir’s Pan-pipes score is one of the delights of The Tall Blond Man With One Red Shoe, one of the best spy films evah.
I confess to a great enjoyment of uilleann pipes, however, along with various of the Scottish relatives, so you might find my musical tastes suspect. OTOH, nothing makes a person want to charge out hacking and stabbing like a Scots march on the pipes*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFi7bWkyRpA
*Opinions vary on whether this charge is an attempt to escape the pipers.
heh. That’s quite the introduction to a club! I’m afraid tobacco and I do not get along well at all – secondhand smoke will make me sick to my stomach within the hour – so pipe club is probably not for me. I do attend an excellent book club though 🙂
In my case it is my sinuses and throat that are rude. They clog and close and, as I have yet to figure out how to manage without breathing, I have to retreat. I find it is far worse with cigarettes than other forms of tobacco smoke, so I suspect that whatever they process the tobacco with to make the cigarettes adds enormously to my problem.
There are only a couple of places that the smoke nazis left untouched here in St Louis, and the remaining few are, I believe, private clubs of a sort. The guy that organizes the pipe club meetings every month is supposedly a member of this place and pays about 1k a year for the privilege.
The dimly-lit smoking room is paneled and trimmed in a uniform dark wood with an ornate ceiling that’s dotted with ornate wooden medallions easily two feet wide or more. The furnishings are all supple leather, either in large comfy chairs (“Fetch..the comfy chair!”) or benches along the walls. There is one small bar with an entire wall of taps that dispense everything from brandy to cognac, ranging in price from the just-drinkable to the extremely drinkable, though far more expensive.
The environment just screams out, “sit down and have a smoke or three”.
Alongside the argument over double-spacing after sentences was another argument over whether or not the period should go inside or outside the quotes in a sentence structured as the one previous to this.
Who know English profs were actually passionate?
I knew, particularly after the amazing performance of my older and quite proper specialist in Victorian poetry freshman English Professor took down a whole room of jocks over their denseness regarding the actions in Madame Bovary!
The smoking parlor, according to your description, sounds elegant, just as it should be, someplace a bit out of time and place, where the world outside should not intrude.
The thing that was most striking about the group was the age range. I’m 42, but I was easily in the average. The number of 20-somethings surprised me. The conversations were as good as the tobacco and drink, winding from topic to topic with everyone seeming to tuck in amicably regardless of controversial nature of the discussion at hand. Very refreshing.
In word you can easily do a replace-all and make all double spaces in the document single spaces. It is an annoying rule but an easy fix.
Yeah. I’ve done those. The “turn all underscores into italics” is the most annoying, but it can be done.
Three asterisks to a hash mark needs to use special characters.
Underscores-to-italics is way simple in MS Word. Well, not the most recent version. I don’t have that. I poked at it and determined that having to “upgrade” meant I’d cling to my current computer till it died.
But prior to that, just bring up the Find, click to the Find-and-replace tab, click the down-arrow to get all the fancy stuff, and select Format (underline) for the top “find” and Format (italics, no underline) for the bottom “replace” and leave the actual windows blank.
Presto!
I did that a couple days ago, as it happens. >_>
Hashmarks/stars… yeah, I’d have to double-check that one. Meh.
If you can do that, I’m surprised you had trouble with the hashmarks and stars — I found that one easy.
I don’t understand why you need to use special characters for the asterisks to hash marks. It worked just fine when I tested it.
What is more annoying is that THEY DON’T TELL YOU. Some editors will reject anything they see with double spaces between sentences. Some old-fashioned types will still reject anything with single spaces between sentences. Some, I suspect, will reject anything unless you use the exact right number of asterisks on a blank line to indicate a scene break, or they’ll insist on guillemots instead of curly quotes, or demand a sacrifice of a bottle of whiteout to the God of Obsolete Office Technology. But they won’t say that’s what they want. And one editor’s send-me-this-and-you’re-dead quirks are matters of complete indifference to another.
Show me a macro that can get it right for one house style, and I’ll show you a macro that is wrong for all the others.
Surprisingly, NIH has found that monospaced fonts are harder to read than proportionally spaced fonts.
(LOUD Sigh) For those who know something about the printing industry (not publishing, printing), this is what is affectionately known as, “No s&^%, Sherlock”. Not in reference to you, but in reference to the publishers. Proportional fonts’ intent is that they be easier to read, because letters like lowercase “i” and “l” are clearly not as wide as a capital “W”, so if you have a monotype word like, “Wilmington”, it looks like “W i l m i ngton” in a monospaced font.
Frankly, for minor differences of style such as those above, I think the likelihood is that they didn’t like what you wrote, probably for political reasons, but sent you the reasons quoted because they were something they could hang their rejection on and make it look like it’s your fault for not following their format, rather than the real reason (now, I’ve written this before reading all the comments, I’ll probably see that someone wrote the same thing up above).
“Frankly, for minor differences of style such as those above, I think the likelihood is that they didn’t like what you wrote, probably for political reasons, but sent you the reasons quoted because they were something they could hang their rejection on and make it look like it’s your fault for not following their format, rather than the real reason”
I’ll answer that with a quote from Tom Simon,
“one editor’s send-me-this-and-you’re-dead quirks are matters of complete indifference to another.”
At the beginning of this year (or was it the end of last year? I forget if it were Dec or Jan) I submitted to an anthology that used what I believe is the styleguide linked above. (Internet playing funny buggers right now with links, so I can’t be bothered to look when it took me 30 minutes to load the comments page here. :p)
I sighed a little, but conformed my writing style to the guide’s preferred method – excepting a few circumstances. For instance, the – dash with a space around it. I hated the way the styleguide wanted it to be done. HATED it. It didn’t look right, it didn’t feel right, and I just flat refused to do it. I’m pretty sure there was another one, even smaller than that little bit of rebellion, but I can’t remember which it was, because there were a lot of (imho) stupid things they wanted you to do that I didn’t like, but I knuckled under and did anyway.
I’m not really even very sure why I refused to do it, since it was such a silly little thing to refuse to do. I’m not exactly Mark Twain who can telegraph to have the proofreader shot. It was a very conscious decision. Not because I think I’m “better than” doing it or “know better” or anything like that. It didn’t look right, I didn’t like it, and I suppose maybe it was the one of a long list of changes I’d have to make to the document that I just couldn’t do, even to make my first sale (it was technically my first attempt at selling too, so you’d think I’d have been more eager and willing to make changes since ti was really before I’d fully researched into self-publishing and I honestly thought the best way to “break in” was to work the anthology market).
So now I wonder which of these it was: a wild hair of rebellion, the bit I knew about self-publishing lurking in the back of my mind telling me that it wasn’t really the way to go for me, perhaps the part of me that knew I’d stripped the story down to the bare bones to meet the maximum wordcount and self-sabotaging to prevent the skeletal version from being published, or maybe just self-sabotaging behavior in general. What I *can* tell you is that when I got the rejection (nothing beyond, “Thanks for submitting, but no thanks. Sorry that we can’t give personal rejection letters.”) I was so far from offended that I was a little worried about my lack of reaction to it.
Anyhoo – in my personal writing, I’ve just come up with my own internal styleguide and stuck to it. I’ll never make anyone perfectly happy with the way I use punctuation or formatting, but I make myself the most happy with it, so I’m content with that.
(Also, re: doublespace after a sentence. I was never formally trained in that method, but I picked it up when reading about writing submissions. I even followed it faithfully for quite awhile and liked it. At some point in the last few years, though, it was specifically listed as something to avoid, so I retrained myself to stop using it. It still crops up from time to time when I’m sleep-typing and I’m half thinking about going back into the habit. I just think it’ll be harder to re-retrain myself to do it. ._.; Funny the things writers think of, isn’t it?)
When did the single space thing at the end of a sentence become prevalent? I learned to touch type on an old Apple 2e back in second or third grade, so either 1992 or 1993, and we had double space after ending punctuation pounded into our heads. I personally dislike single space at the end of a sentence, it looks wrong and it doesn’t give a clear a message of stop, really, we mean it to me. Thankfully, none of my college professors were ever so nit-picky to try and break me of it, because I’m not sure if I could stop even if I tried.
Thanks,
Dawn
All I want to say, Doctor, is that there’s a tremendous amount of research being done on such things as restoring disks, repairing nerves, and so forth. Can you tell those guys to hurry? I and a hundred others like me anxiously await the practical application of that research!
I kinda skimmed, above, so if someone else already said this, apologies; but: 1) In every field of endeavor, there seem to be people for whom form is more important than substance. Sometimes they’re part of your audience; sometimes an important part, because they also do politics well. Maybe it’s better not to fight them, but just put together a word-processor macro that scans your whole document for “period-plus-double-space”, or whatever, and ‘fixes’ it to suit that audience.
2) Rejection letters with false reasons are, in my opinion, just cowardice – as an editor, you should either accept the responsibility to develop authors to your employer’s standards and give good, honest, helpful reasons, or blow off the author with a “doesn’t meet our present needs” and know you risk never seeing their future, better submissions. Don’t try to do one while pretending to do the other – hardly anybody’s dumb enough not to see through you!
I need to post a set of macros on my blog for various word processing programs. “Run this macro to clean your document to Standard Fiction Manuscript Form” in two versions, Courier and Georgia, although personally, I find that I like Lucida after having been turned onto it by Jim Baen.
That macro then would
Set paper size to letter
Set margins to 1 inch all around
Replace all occurrences of dot space space with dot space
Replace all space dash with dash
Replace all dash space with dash
Replace all lines containing only *** or * * * with a line containing only #
Format all lines containing only # to centered.
Replace all underline with italic
Identify clusters of single line paragraphs and tag as quotations.
Identify clusters of lines starting with a series of 1), 2) … or a) b) etc and tag them as ordered lists.
Identify clusters of lines starting with * or middot and tag them as unordered lists.
Tag everything else as body text.
Format all body text paragraphs to 5em indent ragged right
I have a macro which -almost- does that now, but not quite. I’ll try to get to this in my ample spare time.
-_ Rick