Problems with hyphenated words

[Snow Snake]

Hi,

I've been writing in Microsoft Word, and submitting by means of the Browse function, as opposed to copy-and-paste (I want to retain formatting, such as em-dashes, italics, and ellipses).

Here's my problem: Word automatically hyphenates words at line-breaks, and these hyphenated words persist into the finished document, as displayed on the Lit. site. In other words, I end up with errors like "as-sured' or "Don-na" in the middle of lines of texts. Can someone recommend a fix?

Sincere thanks,

Snow Snake

 

[sr71plt]

You can (and probably should, as it's archaic) turn off the Word hyphenation at the margin. The menu for getting this done is different in different forms of Word, but if you go to your Word Help and query hyphenation, you should be able find out how to turn the hyphenation off. (You actually shouldn't have this hyphenation showing up anyway. You should have the text set for flush left/ragged right, not for full justification. If you have it set for that, there won't be any hyphenation on the right margin. Lit. doesn't full justify no matter what you do anyway.)

I don't have any trouble with the cut/paste in the submissions box retaining em dashes. You shouldn't have much italics, and I don't think it's hard to <i> </i> code for these. And if you use the ellipses that publishers use ([character space]period[character space]period[character space]period[character space]), you won't have trouble with those in cut/past either.

Cut/paste in the submissions box is the least-problem approach. Honest engine.

 

[Snow Snake]

Hi sr71plt,

Sincere thanks for the help! I'll try your suggested fix for the hyphenation problem. I'm running Microsoft Office for Mac (not the latest version), and I tried pasting my text into Mac's Pages software, saving it in their native format, and then exporting it in .doc format. That seems to do the trick, too.

As it turns out, I'm already following your other formatting suggestions, and know how to mark-up code by hand, so the copy-and-paste option would be a good solution for me. I have to say that I've been pleased with the Browse function, so far. It's worked extremely well for me, with the exception of this problem that's being caused by my software.

Again, thank you very much for taking the time to help!

All the best,

Snow Snake