Manuscript Preparation
Charles King's guide to manuscript preparation for authors and editors is available in two formats.
Printable version. (203k Acrobat PDF)
On-screen version. (Page by page in browser, 26 pages)
As mentioned in the guide, you can download the printable keyboard shortcuts for special character generation here:
Windows. (76k Acrobat PDF)
Macintosh. (87k Acrobat PDF)
Recommendations Discussed in the Guide
- Use a style guide like The Chicago Manual of Style.
- Be consistent.
- Review non-printing as well as printing characters.
- A manuscript should be a single, comprehensive DOC or RTF word processing file.
- Use simple {callouts} (instructions for the typesetter not intended to be printed) for image insertions, internal references and sidebars.
- Use minimal effective formatting.
- Restrain your word processor's "autocorrect" feature.
- Use one space at ends of sentences.
- Either single or double vertical line spacing is fine.
- Prefer italics and small caps to the much more intrusive bold, underlining, and all caps.
- Work on an index only after typeset is complete and approved as final.
- Don't marry your formatting to the 8.5" x 11" page (especially poetry).
- Use indents to begin paragraphs, not tabs or spaces.
- Ellipses should have non-breaking spaces before and between the dots. Exception: where abutting quotation marks, no space between quote mark and first/last dot.
- Use dashes consistently and use a correct symbol for them.
- Use en dashes rather than hyphens to indicate ranges.
- Make quotes, apostrophes, inch marks, and foot marks the proper shapes.
- Make sure punctuation is correctly italic or not by context.
- Avoid ordinals and blue website/email links.
- Use page breaks rather than repeatedly striking the Enter key to advance to the next page.
- And more . . .
