Hannah, a fellow slusher for The FB, wants a t-shirt that reads "Give me Courier or give me death!"

Sweet. :) I might just put something like that together once I get around to reinstalling Photoshop.

Probably it bored everyone else in the program to tears, but one of my favorite sessions in the research methods course they gave us in graduate school was the one on essay formats — the gist of which was that it’s okay for your essays to look like they came out of a typewriter, and it’s okay for them to look like pages out of a book, but it’s not okay for them to be in 10-point Times with 24-point leading and half-inch margins.

I like Times New Roman. I find it much more pleasant to read than Courier. This isn't really an issue for me as an editor because in email mainly what I want is for people to stop cut-n-pasting their stories with choppy line wraps. And if an editor specifically requests a type of font then one should follow their guidelines, so if I sent you guys a zeppelin story I'd go with Courier. But in a printed ms (assuming proper margins and so forth) I think 12-point Times is lovely.

Are you telling the authors about it? Are you reading the mss that use TNR? Are you not reading mss for any other gaffes? What's the question to life, the universe, and everything?

Karen — I should admit up front that I’m a typography and layout nut, and so my aesthetic reaction to a printed page is probably stronger than it really should be. What bothers me, really, is not so much Times New Roman per se as

1. double-spaced Times New Roman with really long lines — I’m a natural speed reader, and being forced to read across line-by-line is a mild torture — and

2. the fact that submitters of manuscripts thus formatted obviously didn’t read the posted guidelines.

Scott, I’m sure the formatting will count as a subliminal black mark, but I’m not actually throwing out malformatted stories at this point, nor bothering to inform the authors (other than those who happen to run across my weblog).

If I’m in a particularly bad mood when I get around to composing rejection form letters, maybe I’ll include “failure to read the posted guidelines” in an Analog-style list of Fifty reasons why your story may or may not have sucked too badly to print.

But probably not. I’m not cruel enough yet.

I get a lot of "malformatted" manuscripts for Say... but nothing so egregious that I've just not read the story at all. The reasons for asking for monospaced fonts have probably gradually morphed from the pragmatic (being able to make an accurate guess of how much formatted page space a particular story would take up by looking at the manuscript) to the cultural. That said, I still want 12 point Courier.

A lot of the people who submit stories to us tend to get their bad formatting ya yas out in the cover letters--multiple fonts, flowery italics, SFWA member stamps, etc. None of this really bugs me all that much, but it does make me wonder if many people actually read guidelines, or all those "how to format a manuscript" essays that are floating around the net (I used to be pretty religious about following the Vonda McIntyre rules, myself).

I have to admit that when one forward-thinking potential contributor actually asked about Times vs. Courier, I had a hard time coming up with concrete reasons why Courier was better. More than anything else, I think consistency is what makes the “standard” format valuable.

I generally follow it myself because, y’know, why risk irritating an editor when you don’t have to? Though for paper submissions I do generally substitute VT Screenplay Smith for Courier, if only because I’m a sucker for retro. (And I do think that, Smith being a little heavier than Courier and having those cute little round serifs, it reads better.)

I generally use TNR 14/28 unless the market GLs specify otherwise. 14 solves the long-line problem David griped about, and 28 gives a word count per page very close to the classic format. I happen to find serif fonts in general a hell of a lot more readable than Courier etc (as do most of us, which is why books aren't set in Courier), and TNR is just easier on the eyes. 14 is also easier for than 12 in a tiny x-height font like TNR for people with suboptimal vision (most editors, I'm sure).

Yeah, but Courier is a serif font, isn't it? Or am I insane?

I think it's the monospaciness of it that makes it good. I myself am considering submitting in Monaco, just to be different (assuming I finish in time).

Sarah --

Courier is actually an 'Egyptian' or 'slab serif' font, which is an intermediate state between sanserif and serif fonts. Mostly confined to 'typewriter' or 'machine' fonts, though I'm sure some type geek can correct me. One of the things that makes Courier harder to read is also the monospace aspect, which may be more to the point than the serif aspect.

Jay

To my knowledge, we've never rejected a story (or stopped reading it) solely on the basis of bad formatting--although we've had authors accuse us of it. (Sometimes we'll mention formatting problems in the rejection letter, and for some authors there's no amount of "while this had no bearing on our decision" disclaimering in the world that will keep them from thinking that you're such a petty bastard of an editor that you rejected their brilliant story just because it used curly quotes instead of straight quotes.)

Mostly, though, it just puts me in a bad mood. It's like what I tell my students when I'm TA'ing. On in-class written exams, I can't mark them down for bad spelling, punctuation, or handwriting. If reading their exam makes me angry, though, they're less likely to get the benefit of the doubt on close grading calls.

Very well put.

If I thought I could get away with it, I’d probably try to get everyone to use the MS Word style sheet I developed for my grad school essays, or something like it. Maybe with 14-point type instead of 12.

I like to use Courier New 11 with 1.0" margins, because that's the closest I can come to the standard "10-pitch" format I got from some prozine (Analog?) back in the '70s. Vonda's manuscript formatting article on the SFWA website matches this standard.

However, one of the folks in my crit group insists that 11 points is too small and 1.0" margins are too narrow; he wants Courier 12 and 1.5" margins. (I think his eyes are going.) He also says that Courier New is too light and keeps giving me copies of a font called Dark Courier and begging me to use it.

I admit that Courier New is awfully light, but I prefer to keep my manuscripts in a standard font, so that if I email them out I have a good shot at them looking the same to the recipient as they do on my screen.

There are a few other things I make sure to do before sending a manuscript out: turn off Widow/Orphan Control, turn on Don't Hyphenate, and globally replace all hyphens with nonbreaking hyphens (^~). This makes sure that all pages are the same length and prevents manuscript em-dashes (--) from breaking across lines, both of which are no-nos in standard manuscript format.

I was a real "standard MS format" nazi at Clarion, but I've gotten much more relaxed about it in recent years. Why, sometimes I don't even check my manuscript to make sure I have two spaces after each sentence (and ONLY there).

Yeah, the non-breaking hyphen is a wonderful thing. I also find Courier too light, but I use it for e-subs anyway since folks are likely to have it. Smith I save for printouts.

Two spaces after periods? Really?

I thought this was unnecessary these days, and in the past it's made for some interesting layout ARGHS during Say... production.

I was under the impression that two spaces after the punctuation at the end of a sentence was still the rule for manuscripts, though one space is the rule in typesetting.

But a quick web search reveals that one space is now widely accepted in manuscripts. Even the Chicago Manual of Style says so.

Huh. Learn something new every day.

However, I seriously doubt I will be able to retrain my fingers to stop doing it.