Formats for Editing

[dr_mabeuse]

(This is a spin-off of the "White Space" thread)

If you're submitting a story to be edited, or if you're an editor and receiving a story for editing, do you have a preferred format you'd like to recieve it in? I know, it's usually a trivial matter to take an MSWord document and reformat it for editing, but just how do you reformat it for this?

The default Word format is of course "Normal". I myself don't like Normal because it's not very reader-friendly, so I modified it to a style I call ASTM (long story) with justified margins, first-line indent for new paragraphs, single line spacing in paragraphs but double line between paragraphs. This gives the text a bookish, published look (thought not necessarily a Lit-publihsed look) that I find comfortable to write in. It screws up my words-per-page count (no longer ~250 words/page. Never figured out the new word/page ratio) but ord does that for you anyhow.

So I'm wondering what styles people write and edit in. And while we're at it, do you write in "Normal" view, or "Print layout" view?


---dr.M.

 

[Weird Harold]

I know, it's usually a trivial matter to take an MSWord document and reformat it for editing, but just how do you reformat it for this?

The default Word format is of course "Normal".

I write and edit in Normal View because that gives me the largest screen area to work with. I find that a Font size of 14 in Times New Roman is easiest for me to read on-screen, so that is what I've modified my Normal.DOT template to use.

When writing for Lit or other online formts, I use Plain Text (which is also reconfigured to 14 pt TNR)

The Plain text template turns off "smart quotes" and "auto-correct" to stop "special characters from being used.

I also habitually have "show non-printing characters" -- i.e. paragrph breaks -- turned on so that I can see the extraneous force line breaks and paragraph breaks that mess up thee conversion to Lit's HTML formatting.

I DO NOT use Words paragraph formatting to add white space betweenparagraphs -- I use the double paragraph break Lit requires for submissions.

Usually, the first thing I do to a clients formatting is a global replace of one paragraph break with two and change the template to (my version of) Plain Text.

The second thing is to turn on Change Tracking and reset the spelling and grammar check for the initial spelling and grammar check.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Harold,

So you use the grammar checker? That thing drove me crazy. It doesn't like the way I write at all. What do you use it for?


---dr.M.

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

The grammar checker: I never use it. It dislikes passive sentences and always tries to reconfigure them so that they're "active," because typically an active sentence is considered more compelling. However, if I use a passive sentence it's generally because it conformed to a style choice or something I was attempting to convey- not because I wasn't aware of the option.

Additionally, in many of the more structured sentences (that are creative, yet perfectly correct) the grammar checker will consistently mistake the subjects and their corresponding verbs, modifiers etc, and mark it as wrong.

Overall it's a hassle- except for very straightforward writing- but that's just my opinion.

Mlle

 

[Weird Harold]

So you use the grammar checker? That thing drove me crazy. It doesn't like the way I write at all. What do you use it for?

Primarily because it's required to compute the readability statistics, which I use to find problem areas -- long sentences, excessive passive voice, excessive readabiliity or grade level.

Used as intended -- as an aid or tool, rather than as a final arbitor -- MS Word's grammar check and the readability statistics can tell me a lot about where some of the less obvious problems with a story are.

 

[snooper]

MS Word's grammar check and the readability statistics can tell me a lot about where some of the less obvious problems with a story are.

So do you really think that the ten-year-old child, tabloid newspaper style of writing (no passive, no dependent clauses, etc) that MSWord grammar checker advocates is a good one?

 

[Rainbow Skin]

I want two templates; I don't know if it's possible to set up two with options turned on or off as I want them.

One is for printing on paper: Garamond, 10 point, smart quotes, first line of paragraph indented. It may contain bold and italics, and a heading which is likely to be centred and in a larger size and different fount. I would like everything else in the word-processor turned permanently off, so that accidentally hitting Ctrl-E or Ctrl-T doesn't do anything, and the program isn't bloated with useless things like tables, version tracking, columns, styles, or spelling checking.

The other would be for pasting into plain-ASCII websites like here: Times for on-screen readability, 12 point, straight quotes, no indentation, and nothing else.

I do, in both uses, keep automatic typo correction turned on, so that 'hte' becomes 'the'. The advantage of that outweighs the loss of control--except that it corrects 'n;t' with a smart quote even when they're turned off. Not sure what to do about that.

Always Normal view, because it wastes less space, except possibly immediately before printing for some delicate formatting I occasionally try.

Otherwise, everything off. If I wanted the paragraph after one beginning with '1.' to begin with '2.', I would type a '2.' when I got to it. I hate its reformatting. I hate finding that what I typed as bold has got changed to a heading style. Version tracking is much too complicated to turn off, though I like pretty colours, and the spelling and grammar checking are nothing but figures of mockery. Readability? I decide on that: that's what I'm here for.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I submit all my stories in my "ASTM" style and can't say as I've noticed any major formatting changes when it's posted to Literotica. ("ASTM" is basically "Normal" with line justification, first line of paragraph indented 0.5", double space between paras, single space within, Times New Roman 11) The main thing I notice is loss of italics, and so I've learned to write without italics. I believe that the Lit version did some weird things to some double dashes as well

On the other hand I never went back to check that the formatting in the published vesion is exactly the same as what I submitted. As I recall Lit stuff doesn't have first-line para indent, but that's not life or death to me.

And wait: I think once or twice I did notice an unintended and rather jarring line break, but I just chalked those up to the usual computer demons.

---dr.M.

 

[Rainbow Skin]

Italics

I assume the text goes in here as plain ASCII-7, so italics would be lost. I always use <i>...</i>, and also mention them in the notes field, because the guidelines do say you have to if you don't want it printed as is.

But the Preview turns the <i>...</i> into italics, so that might be automatic. I haven't needed to try anything else, and don't want to experiment, so I'm sticking with the possibly redundant note to the editor.

 

[fifty5]

(This is a spin-off of the "White Space" thread)

If you're submitting a story to be edited, or if you're an editor and receiving a story for editing, do you have a preferred format you'd like to recieve it in?
---dr.M.

My experience is with university assignment submissions, not stories for editing, but I guess that the issues are very similar...

What I've found is that, if you'll pardon the phrasing, MS Word isn't MS Word compatible - different versions treat the same 'mark up' differently; and other variations, like the version of Windows, and having different fonts installed, can screw things up tighter than a torque wrench!

My 'bottom line' was plain old ASCII-7, using old-style 'e-mail' emphasis, like _underline_ and *bold" (or just using CAPS for emphasis), with 2 carriage returns between paragraphs and none inside them.

Nothing else was 100% reliable, so I discouraged my students from using anything else.

Similarly, when adding my comments, I just put them in-line (in a different colour), or else added in-line reference numbers, with numbered comments.

When some folk are still using Word6, while others use '97, 2k, XP, etc. etc. anything more than that simply couldn't be guaranteed to work (though 9 out of 10 did, most of the time).

Hope that's useful - that's my intention.

f5

 

[Weird Harold]

Re: Re: Formats for Editing

What I've found is that, if you'll pardon the phrasing, MS Word isn't MS Word compatible - different versions treat the same 'mark up' differently; ...

When some folk are still using Word6, while others use '97, 2k, XP, etc. etc. anything more than that simply couldn't be guaranteed to work (though 9 out of 10 did, most of the time).

One bit of confusion I've encountered, is that WordPad uses the Word 6.0 document format and can't disply any of the advanced reviewing tools that MS Word 97 and later use.

The only incompatibility in the reviewing tools that I know of between any versions of MS Word later than Word 97 is the color selections. Word 2K and later recognise "High Color" (16bit) and "True Color" (24bit) colors and Word 97 only recognises 16 colors.

Even the color differences have little effect on compatibility when editing for Lit, because Word 97 just truncates the value to one of the 16 it can use. In other applications the color conflicts might be more critical.

Wordpad files do cause problems, but I always made sure the Word files actually came from MS Word before using the reviewing tools. MS Works, Wordperfect, and several other word processing programs can produce Word format DOC files, but they are the minimum level of compatibilty -- usually Word 6.0 format which doesn't support the advanced reviewing tools available in Word 97 and later.

Whatever method an editor uses it is always a good idea to determine what Word Processor theclient is using. Sometimes ASCII-7 and HTML are the only points of compatibility between systems, but tht's a very rare occurance in my experience.

 

[KillerMuffin]

Well, no matter how you "style" the document, Laurel has to strip all of that stuff out of it. The more bells and whistles you use--that is the more "professional" you make things look--the more difficult you make it for her to format your document for publication. If it's too difficult, it's removed.

By the way, headers and footers are unnecessary since this is all web-based and there are no pages to accidentally drop and lose track of.

However, you should write however it makes you comfortable. Just remember that it has to transfer to a webform. Obviously, dr. m has had no difficulties with it, but when you start formatting styles in the word processor, you start adding word processor code that the webforms can't read. Even if you upload the document, it has to be copy and pasted into the webform at the editor's end.

Rainbow Skin has the best method for formatting text, I think. Though, for printing I use Courier or Times New Roman depending on the publisher's guidelines. Courier to count words, Times New Roman to submit.

 

[Weird Harold]

So do you really think that the ten-year-old child, tabloid newspaper style of writing (no passive, no dependent clauses, etc) that MSWord grammar checker advocates is a good one?

No, not necessarily. If you followed every suggestion that MS Word's grammar check made, you'd wind up with a very generic and uninteresting story.

However, some puctuation problems and garbled sentence structures are easier to find withthe grammar check than they are manually and determining why the grammar check objected to something often leds to a better way of phrasing something.

The grammar check is only one tool among many for finding problem areas in a story and is required for a tool I find even more useful than the grammar check itself -- Word's readability statistics.

Readability statistics are just another tool and NOT an absolute standard of quality, any more than the grammar check is. However, a paragraph that Word rates as Grade level 12 with readability index of 25% probably has something that could be improved about it. Certain "bad habits" or trends in a writer's style show up as patterns in the readability statistics and learning those patterns has helped me to find the areas that will improve a story with the fewest changes to the author's style.