At 09:51 4/25/96 -0800, Foxtrot wrote:

Neil: to format to 70 characters, hit the return button after
about 10-12 words  in a line.

Another trick that helps is to make your own ruler line, like those on top 
of the screens with word processing programs.  Just type a line of spaces
with some kind of symbol at regular intervals, especially where you want 
your lines to end.  Then cut it, and paste it whenever you need to see where 
your margin is.  The one I used is 

         0         0         0         0         0         0     5

Every tenth character is a 0, and the 65th character is a 5.  It helps when 
I'm typing something in Notepad but want to keep the lines within 65 
characters so that it won't be messed up when I open the file in WordStar 
6.0 (an old DOS word processor that uses plain text files) for the last 
formatting changes before I print it.  I'll admit it's a little low-tech, 
but using plain text is a lot faster than using big, slow programs like MS 
Word.

The advantage to this is that you don't need to keep track of a line's word 
count, or end up with weird margins because some lines get 10 short words 
and others get 12 long ones.