Formatting Your Manuscript

by Elaine Marie Carnegie-Padgett

Hello Again! Hope this finds you all well and experiencing good health and many acceptances in this New Year of 2025!

This week, while the formatting process of the Journeys IV / Magic & Mystery was still fresh in my mind, I wanted to do an article on formatting for the submission process.

It is sometimes difficult to understand, read and edit a manuscript with fancy fonts, tabbed indents or paragraphs with too much space between them or not enough. It is hard for an editor to determine what an author means to do when the formatting is unusual.

When an editor or publisher takes time to read submissions, they want a succinct, professional, easy to read manuscript. Very few have the time to sit and decipher a manuscript or re-format it so it is easier to read. If you are serious about submitting your manuscripts for publication, you owe it to your own hard work to learn how to professionally edit that work.

From my own experience, a mistake that causes problems in formatting a manuscript for publication is extra spaces and hard returns. It is difficult to have to go back over a manuscript and manually delete extra spaces and hard returns or tabbed paragraphs, or even dotted indents, which are all eliminated by using the formatting suggestions in this article. (Of course this is for a manuscript, not poetry, songs or other short and flash fiction.)

When writing a manuscript for submission it is easiest to format the original document for this purpose. I use Microsoft Word 360 and all of these instructions are for that software.

If you are using Word click the "Home Tab" (Yellow arrow) then click the "¶" (Yellow circle) symbol. This will show you all of your spaces and formatting marks. You can see where you have extra spaces or hard indents or tabbed spaces.

Your text will then look like this:

The dots are spaces made with your space bar, and the arrows are the result of a tab key. All extra spaces should be removed when formatting a manuscript for publication. When the text is formatted with the paragraph box, the text will look like this:

This is just an example, but it should give you an idea about how your manuscript bones look to a publisher before formatting. Below are the steps to using the formatting options in Word.

If you are using Word click the upper “Layout” (Yellow arrow) tab.

That will bring up the “Margins” (Yellow circle) selection. Click "Margins" and set top, bottom, left and right margins to one inch. Click OK or save, whichever option you are given.

Next, by right clicking anywhere in the document and then clicking on "Paragraph," this box will come up. This box lets you set the standard formatting for your document to ultimately be submitted for publication.

For standard formatting refer to Shunn Formatting which is a set of guidelines created by William Shunn for structuring and presenting manuscripts, widely used by authors to ensure their submissions are clear and professional. Requested by publishers for easier readability and story flow.

These guidelines include several key elements to follow. Manuscripts should be double-spaced with one-inch margins on all sides to provide ample room for annotations. The author's name and address must be positioned in the top left corner of the first page, while the word count, rounded to the nearest hundred, should be placed in the top right corner. Additionally, the byline is placed directly beneath the title of the work.

The font of choice is usually 12-point Times New Roman or a similar serif typeface, ensuring readability. Paragraphs should be indented by 0.5 inches without extra spacing between them, preserving the flow of the text. This keeps you from ever having to indent with tabs or hard spaces.

These guidelines can be downloaded here. (Zip Archive)

Your first page will look something like this:

You can find more information here:                                                                                                 

https://www.shunn.net/format/classic/

https://www.shunn.net/format/

If you have any questions, feel free to send me a PM on Facebook or an email. Watch next week for an update article by Susan Reynolds Crane!

Thanks for reading!

EC