A manuscript's formatting is not judged on its beauty. It is judged on whether it lets an editor read the text without thinking about the file. Every choice that draws attention to itself — an unusual font, decorative headers, text in two columns — costs the writer a little credibility before the first sentence has been read.
The standards below are conventions, not laws. They exist because they work, and because most publications have settled on them.
The page
Standard manuscript formatting is deliberately plain.
- Paper size: A4 for UK and European submissions, US Letter for American ones. Check the submission guidelines; the difference matters when a page limit is specified.
- Margins: one inch (2.54 cm) on all sides. Wider margins are acceptable; narrower ones look cramped and leave no room for an editor's notes.
- Line spacing: double, for anything that will be edited on paper. Single spacing is fine for internal documents that will only be read on screen.
- Alignment: left-aligned, not justified. Justified text creates uneven gaps between words, and those gaps are distracting in a long read.
- Paragraph indentation: either a first-line indent of half an inch or a blank line between paragraphs, but not both. Pick one and apply it everywhere.
The type
Use a serif or a clean sans serif that is designed for reading. Times New Roman, Garamond, Georgia, and Book Antiqua are all safe for serif; Arial, Calibri, and Helvetica are safe for sans serif.
- Size: 12 point for the body. Nothing smaller, and nothing larger unless the guidelines say so.
- Style: regular weight throughout. No all-caps paragraphs, no coloured text, no letter-spacing tricks.
- Emphasis: italics for emphasis and for titles of long works. Bold for headings only. Underlining is a typewriter convention and should stay there.
The rule of thumb is that formatting should be invisible. If a reader notices the font before the first paragraph, the font is wrong.
Page furniture
Page numbers go in the top right or bottom centre, on every page. A header with the author's surname and a short title is standard for fiction submissions and helpful for anything longer than a few pages. It lets a printed stack be reassembled if it is dropped.
A title page is usually expected for book manuscripts and often unnecessary for articles. When it is used, it carries the title, the author's name, and contact details, and nothing else. No images, no coloured borders, no inspirational quotations.
For documents that will be reviewed line by line, line numbers are a courtesy. The line counter and add line numbers tools produce a numbered version quickly, and reviewers can then refer to "line 42" instead of quoting a whole sentence.
Headings and structure
Use the word processor's built-in heading styles rather than formatting text to look like a heading. Built-in styles generate a navigable outline, a table of contents, and a consistent hierarchy, and they survive conversion to other formats.
Keep the hierarchy shallow. A document with five levels of heading is usually a document that needs to be split. Most articles need two levels at most; most reports need three.
Numbered headings are appropriate for technical documents and reports, where readers refer to sections by number. They are usually wrong for essays, articles, and fiction, where the reader moves linearly.
File formats
The format you send matters as much as the format you see.
DOCX is the default for anything that will be edited. It preserves comments, tracked changes, and styles, and every editor can open it.
PDF is for final versions and for anything where layout must not move. Do not send a PDF for editing unless you have been asked to.
Plain text (.txt) is the safest archive format. It will open in fifty years, on any machine, with no software. If a document matters, keep a plain-text copy as well as the formatted one.
Markdown (.md) is increasingly common for web writing and documentation. It is readable as plain text and converts cleanly to HTML. The Markdown guide covers the basics.
Avoid proprietary formats that require a specific program, and avoid sending a document as a link to a cloud drive unless the recipient has asked for one. Attachments are more reliable than permissions.
Special elements
Tables should be simple: a header row, consistent alignment, no merged cells unless necessary. If a table needs more than five columns, it probably needs to be split or turned into an appendix.
Footnotes belong at the bottom of the page, not at the end of the document, unless the guidelines specify endnotes. Keep them short; a footnote longer than three lines is usually body text that has been misclassified.
Quotations longer than about forty words are set as block quotations: indented, without quotation marks, with the citation after the final punctuation.
Images should be placed where they belong, with a caption and a credit. Do not use text boxes to position them; they break in conversion.
The checklist before you send
Run through this list once and most formatting problems disappear.
- Margins are consistent on every page.
- The body font and size are the same throughout.
- Line spacing does not change mid-document.
- Page numbers are present and start where they should.
- Headings use styles, not manual formatting.
- Every image has a caption and a credit.
- The file name includes the title, your name, and a version or date.
- The file opens correctly on a machine that is not yours.
That last item is the one people skip. Send the file to yourself, open it on a phone, and check that nothing has moved. It takes a minute and prevents the most embarrassing kind of submission error.
Formatting is not writing, but it is part of being read. The best manuscript formatting is the kind nobody notices, which is exactly the point.