On my machine, Word defaults to "manuscript submission"

Now, in manuscript submission format, it's courier 12pt, not 10, right?

As for my screenplays, professional screenplay format is SO important to get right, I finally broke down and bought one of the two screenplay writing programs.

Even creating specific styles for the various screenplay elements in Word, your screenplay will page out too long, by up to twenty pages, which is a massive difference.

Screenplays theoretically pace out at a minute of screen time per page, so if your format is off, not only will it not time out right, what you thought was a full length screenplay will wind up barely filling ninety minutes.

And if you only wrote a ninety minute story, you're going to wind up with about an hour and fifteen minutes worth of movie.

Oh, I'm totally with Plei on the "make it easy on the eyes of the writer first" reality. I've just been writing on the computer for so long now - first novel, The Goldsmith, was done on a Xerox 850 word processor and the nest three and half were done on a Wang - that I can no longer make anything look right that isn't man-sub formatting.

One of the things that happens sometimes at writers group is that some of our writers - Rosie, Bea - write in the small print single space format. And watching them having to go back halfway through every tenth line because they've lost their place? Oy. It does break the flow of the read.

Disturbing in the middle of the professional conversation, to which I have nothing to contribute: victor, I really liked your colomn. It 'rang' true for even more things, not just writing, too.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled Word Sucks.

Hey, my SO is in, too. Now we can be crazy together in November.

Also to say, since I didn't say it, and only thought it, I lurve Victor's writing.

Sean, I have my default set to Courier 12; my editor is 84 years old. 10 is far too small for her and far too small for me.

But the general? 10 point Courier.

WORD SUCKS.

t dives back into last-minute QA for work

10-point, not 12?

Damn, I need to reformat my manuscript again.

Don't sweat the difference between 10 and 12, IMHO.

Susan, exactly. 10 is that standard, but 12 is easier to read, and editors will love you. Marlene has crappy eyesight, too.

Hmm. I might switch to 10 experimentally, because that way I can make my 100-page partial for Harper a little longer. But I guess I just assumed 12, because the "how to format a manuscript" sheet I'm working from just said Courier without specifying, and I'm used to Times New Roman 12 as the standard for everything else.

There's a really talented writer in my writers' group who does his manuscripts 1.5-spaced in a sans serif font, and I was pretty shocked to find out he's actually submitting them that way. He thinks it makes him stand out. I'm sure it does, but....