A reader writes to ask:

I have perused your formatting advice and have a question. You advise underline to indicate italics, what about bold? Make it "actual" or use asterisks, etc? I need to indicate vectors in bold for a fact article but for sci-fi geared magazine. Thanks.

The use of boldface type is rare enough (at least in the fiction world) that, back in the olden days, one had to indicate it by hand by drawing a squiggly line underneath the words to be bolded. For whatever reason, our society has adopted italics as the preferred method of emphasis, which is why underlining is a function readily available on most typewriters but undersquiggling is not.

Boldface is, however, more common in non-fiction. In cases where it may indeed be required, either by a publication's style guide or by conventions you've adopted for a specific article, I would just go ahead and use the actual bold function of your word processor. You are unlikely these days to submit a manuscript on paper, and using asterisks around the words to be bolded is likely just to result in mistakes in the final copy.

(For a larger discussion of boldface type, see my post "Testifying with Boldface.")

Back in January, Slate's Farhad Manjoo set the blogosphere a-boil with a vitriolic philippic against the evils of ever placing two spaces at the end of a sentence. A veritable Greek chorus rushed to add its voices to his, including no less a figure than John Scalzi. On the flip side, Megan McArdle of The Atlantic spearheaded the opposition, and a flurry of spirited defenses of the two-space tradition set out to demolish the arguments at the center of Manjoo's emotional diatribe.

I stayed out of the fray at the time. I've already had what I hoped would be my definitive say about sentence spacing, and in fact I spent a lot of time last year thinking through some significant ameliorations of my former strict insistence on two spaces. It was never my intention, back in 1995 when I first posted "Proper Manuscript Format" on the web, to become a de facto formatting guru, but it happened anyway. This means I still get frequent emails from aspiring writers who want to know why this authority or that is telling them they should never ever, on pain of banishment to editorial hell, put two spaces after a sentence.

It's probably past time for me to expand further on my position that, while one space is fast becoming the reigning standard, it's still perfectly fine to use two if that's what you prefer.

We are all by now familiar with the argument that the two-space rule is a relic of the typewriter era, outmoded in these days of computer typography and proportional fonts. I am willing to admit this, to a point (even as I am unwilling to unlearn a practice that, through more than three decades of dedicated typing, has become as much a part of me as my two thumbs). But where this argument falls short is in its failure to recognize that the commercial publishing industry, at least in the U.S., had already begun phasing out the two-space rule sixty years ago—at the very height of the typewriter era. It wasn't the advent of the personal computer that made the practice begin to change. It was much earlier advancements in high-volume mechanical typesetting.

Before the 1950s, it's likely your reading material would have contained more space between sentences than we're used to seeing now. But these days single-spacing is what we've come to expect. It's what most of us have grown up with. It's the only standard we've ever known for finished copy.

But there's the rub. Finished copy. The stuff you'd see in a book, in a magazine, in a newspaper, or even on a website like this one. Material that's been through some kind of editing and production process, and has been rendered in a way suitable for presentation to the general reader.

What people who speak in loud voices about sentence spacing are usually referring to, though, are submission manuscripts, and a submission manuscript is not finished copy. Even as the two-space rule was vanishing in print, it hung around in the world of the typewritten manuscript for a very practical reason. It makes the writer's intention about where each sentence ends perfectly clear.

To borrow a metaphor from the online world, a novel manuscript is more like the source code for a book than it is like an actual book. It is a product intended for a very specialized audience—book editors, most of whom are accustomed to its particular quirks. In fact, editors rely on those quirks to help them get their jobs done. A manuscript is not a product intended for a general reader. It is not required to conform to the needs or expectations of a general reader.

Now, as I've conceded many times in these posts, things are changing. The old standards and practices are giving way to newer ones. In many important ways, the gap between the creation of a piece of writing and its presentation to the reader is narrowing. But it's absurd to insist that two spaces is always wrong in a manuscript most readers are never going to see. It becomes even more absurd when you consider the utter lack of an outcry in favor of single line-spacing in manuscripts (a change that would far more obviously bring that format in line with standards for printed material). A manuscript is not finished copy and does not need to look like it.

To use another metaphor from the web world, I think most of the furor over sentence spacing stems from confusing our data layer with our presentation layer. As I'm composing this post right now, I'm putting two spaces between sentences. But as you read it, you're almost certainly seeing only one space. That's because your web browser does the production work of styling the text to conform with generally accepted standards for finished copy. If you're using a browser that allows you to look at a site's source HTML, you can right-click on this page and bring up what is essentially the manuscript version of this post. When you do, you'll see two spaces between sentences. But the fact that I typed those extra spaces in no way interferes with your ability to view the finished copy the "right" way.

I'm not saying you can't use one space in your manuscripts if you want. I'm only saying the writers who want to use two spaces are not wrong. It's a non-issue, and the fact that no professional editor or agent has ever gotten on my case about it only strengthens my point.

I would go further, though, and suggest that when someone tells you how using two spaces between sentences makes you a bad and stupid person, that someone is just an ass.

A reader writes to ask:

Is the occasional Bold word in a manuscript okay? Because every time I change point-of-view, I leave an empty line (which from now on will be filled with a #), and make the first word of the next paragraph bold, just to make it clear to the reader that the point of view has shifted. Or will that depend on who I send my manuscript to?

Your questions evoke a whole thicket of intertwined issues which I will attempt to unbraid for you. The first of these has to do with how best to indicate a point-of-view shift in your fiction. There's no right or wrong way to do this. Some writers feel no compunction about switching POVs without any typographical indication, which is fine if you have enough control over your omnicient narration. Using a scene break or even a chapter break to indicate the shift is the more common technique, and should be sufficient in and of itself. The first couple of sentences after the break ought to make the POV change perfectly clear without any need to employ trickery like boldface words.

This raises our second issue, which is the proper use of boldface text. Boldface is not seen much in fiction, at least not within the text itself. It is seen most commonly in non-fiction, where it is used to emphasize keywords and terms that relate to the subject at hand. From time to time you might see it employed in fiction for typographical effect—for instance, to indicate text that appears on a computer screen, perhaps in an instant-message exchange, or to highlight some other kind of quoted passage. It's rare enough, though, that in the olden days there wasn't a good way to indicate boldface from your typewriter keyboard. Instead, you had to draw a squiggly line directly on the page underneath the text you wanted emphasized.

Then why, you ask, do you see the first few words of a chapter or scene rendered in boldface in so many books? That's a stylistic choice that the book designer has made, not the author. This is the third issue for you to understand, that many of the typographical elements you see in a published book were applied by members of the publishing team during production. These are essentially decorations that are intended to make the text more visually appealing. They're not things you need to worry about as you're working on your own manuscript.

Just do your best to make POV changes clear in the text, and keep your formatting as simple as possible. With luck, you'll be able to let your publisher worry about the rest.

A reader writes to demand:

Setting everything according to the various suggestions for Word to lay out my pages for writing a book, I find it impossible to get 25 lines on an 8½ by 11 when double spaced. Explain.

"Explain"? That's a rather imperious imperative sentence, but I'll do my psychic best to satisfy your command without your Word document in front of me for reference.

I'll summarize what I assume your problem is, though I've covered this issue in much greater detail elsewhere. But let me preface my summary by emphasizing that the number of lines per page probably doesn't even matter. As I try repeatedly to make clear, formatting your manuscript is about following general guidelines, not about breaking out your protractor and slide rule. It's an art, not a science. It's cooking, not baking. As long as your formatting falls in the general neighborhood of correctness, you'll be fine. Don't get so caught up in refining the finest details of your formatting that it bogs you down and distracts you from what's most important: writing the best novel you can.

That said, the issue that's reducing the number of lines you can fit on a page is probably related to line height (the amount of vertical space that each line takes up on the page). By default, Microsoft Word sets a line height that's a little greater than the standard for 12-point type. This results in fewer lines per page. If you're getting 23 or 24 lines per page, I wouldn't worry too much about. If you're getting even fewer than that, you might be doing something else wrong, like more-than-double-spacing your lines or using a text style that puts extra space between paragraphs.

If you're determined to make things precise, though, please see my fuller explanation of line height in the blog post I referenced above, "How line height relates to word count."

I wrote the original version of my manuscript formatting guide in 1993, modeling it after a much older two-page guide I received from Damon Knight in 1985. Back in those days, even for those who'd made the switch to composing prose on computers, the goal of formatting was to produce a document for submission that looked as much as possible like it had sprung to life rolling through the platen of a typewriter, offspring of holy intercourse between paper, typebar, and ink ribbon.

The world of writing and publishing has changed plenty in these past seventeen, or twenty-five, or God knows how many years. A manuscript used to be the mere blueprint for a printed book or story, instructions in a coded language to the typesetter who would laboriously rework the entire thing into clean, finished type. Now the gap between manuscript and book has shrunk to the size of a computer file. Electronic submissions mean that the only physical keystroke in the life history of a given letter in a published work may well be the one executed by the author himself.

The accepted and acceptable standards of manuscript formatting have evolved to reflect this. Proportional fonts are used more and more in manuscripts, while typographical tricks that were necessary on typewriters now no longer make sense. More and more writers are submitting manuscripts that would have looked unacceptable a decade ago, and more and more editors don't mind this one bit. With the almost complete dominance of the word processor, topics like word-count approximation and end-of-line hyphenation are no longer relevant to most of us. It was long past time to update my format guide to reflect this new reality.

You old-school writers and editors, don't worry. I won't abandon my Courier font and double sentence spacing (more on that topic in a future post) without a fight. If I have my way, the manuscripts I produce fifty years from now will look the same as the ones I produce today. But I did want to acknowledge that mores are changing, and that not everyone agrees anymore about what proper manuscript format even means.

The basics still remain, even if some of the details continue to evolve. To those hundreds of sites that have linked to my format guide over the years, I hope you still find it useful and relevant, if not more so than before. To those who've disagreed with it in the past, sometimes vehemently, I hope you find more common ground here now. And to those stumbling across it for the first time? God help you poor kids for wanting to be writers.

Please let me know what you think of the revised and updated version of "Proper Manuscript Format," and best of luck with your writing.

A reader writes to ask:

I read your article on proper manuscript submission and found it to be very informative. I submitted my manuscript to a publisher and received an email that they would like to print but it is lacking formatting. I did not know of the correct formatting until I read your article. Question: Do I resubmit with your recommended format (courier, double spacing, etc.) for printing or do I do something else for the printing version? New at this.

The format described here on my site is intended only for manuscripts being submitted for consideration by an editor or agent. It is not a format for "camera-ready copy," which refers to the layout you see in a published book. A publisher asking you to provide a manuscript ready for printing is most likely a vanity or subsidy publisher, one that you pay out of your own pocket. In traditional commercial publishing, the publisher pays you for the right to publish your book, and then does the bulk of the work to prepare it for printing.

Commercial publishing can be hard to break into, with its complex systems of agents and editors and their rigorous ways of doing business. Getting your book published commercially can also take a very long time. What you get from a commercial publisher, though, is a certain level of professional treatment of your manuscript. If an editor likes your manuscript and wants to buy it for publication, he or she will guide you in rewriting it to make it the best and most compelling work it can possibly be. A professional copyeditor will help iron out spelling, grammar, and continuity errors. A professional typesetter will take your plain manuscript and render it in the sort of clean, beautiful format you're used to seeing in other published books. A professional marketer will, hopefully, help advertise your book in all the right places. A professional sales representative will convince bookstores to stock it, and a professional book distributor will deliver it to those stores.

Vanity publishing is much quicker, but if you go that route you will have to do most of these jobs yourself—not to mention paying up front for the privilege. The quality of your book will also likely not be as high. If you only want to print a few copies of your book for friends and family, that may be fine, but otherwise you should have realistic expectations about what the process will entail and what the likely payoff will be.

A big part of that process will be acquiring and learning to use desktop publishing software like QuarkXPress or Adobe Pagemaker. That is what you will need in order to turn your manuscript into the electronic files your publisher can use to print your book. The commercial publisher Wiley provides extensive guidelines for preparing camera-ready copy, which is not only a good reference for you but gives you some idea of the magnitude of the work involved. (For another discussion of book design, see this post from last year.)

There's nothing inherently wrong with vanity publishing. Just be sure that you understand going in exactly what services this publisher is going to provide for you, and what services you are going to have to provide for yourself. Be sure you're prepared to do all that work before you shell out any money.

A reader writes to ask:

I came upon your blog when asking a question about short story indentation at ask.com. I don't know if you'll ever read this, but if you do and can spare some time, I'd appreciate a response.

I was just about ready to submit an anthology of short stories to the printer. I am self-publishing some of my stories.

Anyway, for some reason, this afternoon I looked at four short story anthologies in my personal library. In three of them, all of the stories begin without any indentation. In the fourth, there is an indentation, but the first letter of each story is formatted in an oversized capital letter.

I have begun each of my stories with a standard paragraph indentation, just as I note you indicate short stories should be formatted. But now seeing the formatting of the anthologies in my possession, I wonder if I should re-do the formatting of the first paragraph of each story.

You seem to be confusing book design with manuscript formatting. Let me try to explain the difference.

Manuscript formatting is what you do to prepare your book or story for submission to an editor. The editor's job is to decide whether or not to accept the manuscript for publication, and then to offer suggestions on improving the manuscript. He or she will likely make a lot of notes directly on the manuscript itself. That's why, when submitting a manuscript to an editor, you should do the things I suggest in my manuscript formatting guidelines, such as using a big, readable font, double-spacing, indenting paragraphs half an inch, and so on.

Once you and the editor have together hammered that manuscript into acceptable shape, the next stage is book design. This is the process by which your manuscript gets converted into the format in which it will be printed and bound. A lot of arcane knowledge and skill goes into proper book design, but at the very least a few basic things will happen. Your manuscript will be changed to a font more appropriate to a finished book. The text will be single-spaced instead of double-spaced. Your book will be given page numbers that appear in different positions on the left and right-hand pages. Paragraph indentations will likely be made smaller. The book designer will also decide what kind of fancy formatting to use at the beginning of each chapter (or, in the case of a collection, at the beginning of each story), and will apply that formatting consistently throughout the book.

All this is in the interest of making your book attractive and easily read by a reader as opposed to an editor. Though there are still rules and guidelines to follow, there is more latitude in book design than in manuscript formatting. When you pull a book down off your shelf to see how it is laid out, you are looking at book design, not at manuscript formatting.

That's what happens in traditional publishing, anyway. When you self-publish, you are essentially cutting out the middleman—the editor. You are not submitting a manuscript for anyone's consideration. You are paying someone to publish your book, and that means going directly to the book-design stage.

The big question to ask here is whether someone at the publishing company will do the book design for you, or if you have to do it yourself. If the company will do it for you, you may be able to offer some suggestions or preferences but you won't have to worry about questions like whether or not to indent or use initials or drop caps at the beginnings of chapters.

But if the company requires you to submit print-ready copy yourself, then you do have to make those choices, and, in fact, you may have a lot of work ahead of you. Word-processing programs like Microsoft Word can be used to create complex book layouts, but that can be tricky unless you're an expert user. Desktop-publishing programs like QuarkXPress or Adobe FrameMaker are more powerful but are also more complicated to learn to use.

In any event, find out from your publishing company how involved you will need to be in the book-design process before you start worrying about how your chapter headings are going to look.

A reader writes to ask:

I read somewhere that if you format properly you should get 25 lines per page, but I consistantly get 24. So when I use Word to give me a word count on 141 pages, I get 28k, but when I do it the way I think publishers want a word count for novels, which is by multiplying the number of pages times 250, I get 35k. That's a big difference.

I followed all of your rules, so I don't understand what I'm doing wrong.

Indulge me a moment, please, while I review a couple of standard typographical measures. The smallest unit in typography is called the point, which measures exactly 1/72 of an inch. Twelve points equals 1 pica. Therefore, we have 72 points per inch, and 6 picas per inch.

A standard typewriter uses 12-point type, which is a measure of the height of the metal block on which each individual letter is cast. This also equals the height of a each line of printed type the typewriter produces, meaning that a typewritten line is 12 points high, or 1 pica, or 1/6 of an inch. Single-spaced, this means you can fit six lines of type per inch. Double-spaced, you get three lines per inch.

Working from this basis, we see that the essential definition of a 12-point font is one that prints in a line exactly 1 pica high. You would think that a word processor would follow that definition and default to a line height of exactly 1/6 of an inch for a 12-point font, but MS Word doesn't. For whatever reason, its default line height is slightly more than that—about 0.185" as opposed to the expected 0.167".

That was a long digression, but that's the explanation for why you're getting fewer lines per pages than what you expect. You can fix this, but first let me point out that, as long as you're close to the standard, your exact line height doesn't really matter. No one is going to count your number of lines per page to make sure you have exactly 25 or 26 or whatever other number you might have heard is appropriate. No editor has the time or inclination to do that. As long as it looks good at a glance, you're fine.

What seems to concern you more, though, is the discrepancy between your estimated word count and the exact count that MS Word gives you. The first thing you need to understand is that your estimated word count will always be higher than the exact word count. An estimated word count is designed to give an editor an idea of how many pages a published book will run, which depends more on the number of lines in your manuscript than on the number of words.

(A dialogue-heavy page with a lot of short, choppy paragraphs, for instance, will likely have a lot fewer words on it than a page with a couple of long, dense paragraphs of exposition. But both pages have the same number of lines, and therefore take up approximately the same amount of space in a published book.)

The next thing to understand is that your estimated word count should be based on the average number of words on one of your pages, which is not necessarily 250. There are complicated formulas you can use to derive your own average word count per page, but I think a good rule of thumb is to call it 10 words for every line. (That's for a Courier font. If you use a proportional font, your number will be higher.) Therefore, for a 24-line page, use 240 for your estimate per page instead of 250. That will shrink your word count by a good amount. It will still be higher than the true count, but you shouldn't worry about that.

In fact, before I continue to explain how to reset your line height in Word, I want to emphasize how unproductive it is to get bogged down in these kinds of details. Your first and most important job is to write the best book you can. Your second most important job is to present that book in the form of an attractive, uncluttered, professional-looking manuscript. As long as that manuscript looks reasonably close to the expected standard format, you'll be fine.

That said, here's how to set your lines in Word to exactly the proper height. If you're using MS Word 2007 or a more recent version—the version with the tool ribbons at the top instead of pull-down menus—then go to the Page Layout ribbon. In the group of tools labeled Paragraph, click the little diagonal arrow icon in the lower-right corner to pop up the Paragraph dialog box. In the Indents and Spacing tab, find the Line spacing drop-down list. Choose the "Exactly" option from the list. Under the At label, set the value to "24 pt." Click OK to exit. (The process in older versions of Word will be similar, though not exactly the same.)

What this does is set your lines to display one every 24 points, or 2 picas. This effectively gives you a double-spaced manuscript with exactly 3 lines to the inch. This way, you should get at least one more line per page than you've been getting. But like I say, that's probably not a level of detail you need or ought to be worrying about.

A reader writes to ask:

Do you have any direction to point me in formatting elaborate typesets in manuscript. i.e. I have a sex scene written in the shape of a penis. Any help?

An interesting question, and one that must have been encountered before by editors of books like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. My gut says you could go one of two ways, depending on how ambitious you are. The first way would be simply to indent the priapic passage as a block of text, draw a line next to it down the left side, and write in the margin a note like "set in penis shape." You could even draw the desired shape in the margin in miniature, if you're not afraid of sending the wrong message to the typesetter.

The second, more ambitious way would be to center the text and try to fashion the penis-shape yourself, painstakingly, with hard (no pun) returns and extra spaces to make everything line up right on both side. (Maybe you'd want to practice that first on a bathroom wall.)

Those are just my best stabs at how I would do it. Any professional editors, typesetters, or book designers out there want to weigh in?