With all the etiquette posts floating around, I thought I'd toss my hat
into the ring. Too many fics get overlooked because of bad formatting
and simple technical mistakes. This can be remedied.
Here's some tips. Having a text-based mail reader of minimal features
(Pine 3.96 on a Unix-based telnet window) on my main account, I know
what looks good and what looks bad. Here's some thing you can do to
make your Word documents better-looking to ASCII-heads:
1 - Replace tabs with five spaces [ ]. Tabs in ASCII are represented
by 8 spaces, which (IMO) is too many. Five was standard for typewriters,
and that's basically what ASCII is.
2 - Two spaces after sentences. This rule was "removed" because of
WYSIWYG editors being smart enough to make the first space after a
period larger. But in a fixed-width font, this doesn't happen. Again,
following typewriter rules works in ASCII.
3 - Straight quotes and apostrophes. Turn this feature off, then do a
global replace (replace quotes with quotes, and apostrophes with
apostrophes). They should straighten right out. This is important; many
readers stop reading when they see a weird symbol at every quotation
mark.
4 - No weird symbols (like the 1/2 symbol ^_^) This is paramount.
Weird symbols like ellipses (...) and the TM and Copyright symbols show
up on a non Wintel machine as control characters (^h, etc.), and are a
pain in the ass to read through. (c), (tm), ... work just fine.
5 - While I'm at it, don't put spaces between your periods in an ellipse
(...), but do put a space after them, as if using a comma. Okay, that
last part has no reason, but the first part saves valuable space. Which
is good.
6 - Spell check. Spell check again. And once more just in case. While
you're at it, do a manual check. Read the story over for homonym errors,
and other mistakes like line breaks (don't use too many), missing quotes,
misspelled words that are actually spelled right (but aren't the right
word anymore).
7 - Line length should be no more than 70 character, though 66 is just
about equivalent to a paperback book's width. This equates to Courier 12 with
1" margins on each side. Set your document to this, let it wrap as
normal, then save the file (under a different name) as a Plain Text With
Line Breaks file. This will do wonders for readability, when combined
with the above tips.
Thank you,
--Matt
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"I stayed up all night playing poker with tarot cards. I got
a full house and four people died." -- Steven Wright
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The Cafe Pierrot: Quality Original and Series-Based Anime Fanfiction
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~matt2518/
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