I did the final printing of my project in Courier New, but found a glitch. About three times in the text, when a sentence apparently had the maximum number of characters, and since Courier doesn't adjust the type to fit the line like Times New Roman does, it printed with the final quotation mark on the next line all by itself. Nothing I did would get those little buggers back on their proper line, and I finally realized I was fighting a losing battle if Courier wouldn't budge about how many characters to put on a line. I left it as it was, figuring if publishers were familiar with Courier, they were familiar with hanging lone quotation marks.

And then (JB, are you listening? This is one of the reasons I said you weren't alone.) After I sent everything off, I happened to glance through Tor's submission guidelines for no reason in particular, nerves, I guess, since I HAD read them before several times prior to printing my project, but somehow never caught the following:

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Please turn off margin justification and proportional spacing; pages with ragged right margins are easier for us to read, and easier for our production department to set.

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"Proportional spacing?" My blood ran a bit cold at that. Isn't that what Courier New is? (Although it doesn't affect ragged margins, which is probably why I missed this.) So I should have just stuck with Times New Roman? And now I have hanging quotation marks like little orphans begging for attention in my mailed manuscript? Aaargh!

<sigh of sad frustration>

I've never had a problem with Courier New. The only thing I don't like about it, which is why I don't use it, is that it prints too light. Instead, I downloaded a darker courier -- Courier10 BT (from Word Perfect, I think) -- which gives you nice dark type. But like Eric said, when I put a quotation mark at the end of a word and it carries past the margin, the quotation mark along with the word carry to the next line.

Good luck Kolona, btw - very excited to hear you sent your manuscript! Sending it successful thoughts. Do you have an agent (not asking who, just yes/no) or did you send to Tor because they take unagented ms (aside from them being a great publishing house)?

(EDIT - dah - took too long to post, and after I did I see JB said that Courier is proportional - glad I had something right!)

In proportional fonts, the amount of space a letter takes up is proportional to its width. So lllll takes up a lot less space than MMMMM.

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In fixed-width fonts, lllll takes up as much space as MMMMM, so the fact that
your manuscript has a lot of M words won't make it seem to be longer than a manuscript
with a lot of l words.

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Margin justification means leave a ragged edge on the right side. Justifying both edges introduces the proportionality again, creating the whole word count mess all over again even if you used a monospaced font.

If it is leaving the " on lines by itself, which is not something caused by Courier, it sounds like you have taken the word wrap (so that that the whole word moves down with the quote) off by accident. Check your word processor settings.

Here's another good page for proper manuscript format.

So what I understand it, from reading guidelines and this thread is:

- white bond paper (does it matter if it is 20lb or 24lb?)
- double-spaced
- unjustified right margin
- one inch margins
- Courier or similar monospace font
- 12pt font

Seriously, folks...Thanks for all the helpful responses. I appreciate it. Eric, I have Word2000. Jerome, I didn’t know you could download a font. I would have thought you had to get the whole program or nothing. I agree that Courier New is too light, and somewhere I read (maybe on Hatrack?) about printing everything in bold, but that seems like a double use of ink. ‘Course, a darker font is probably the same thing. I wondered about the ... ,JB. Courier put all three dots in one space, which I thought was stupid. Seems to me that would throw off the word count. Which settings in particular, GZ? I checked a few things, with no luck, and asked my office assistant about “word wrap,” but she didn’t know much. Strange as this may seem, Pickled, I found a rubber chicken in a parking lot recently. I thought rubbing it would be sufficient, but I guess that only works with lamps.

Punahougirl, thanks so much for the sentiments. No, I don’t have an agent. That quest will be my next order of business. Although I'm glad Tor maintains an active slush pile (bless their brave hearts), I was able to skip it this time and went directly to Go. An editor from Tor critiqued twenty pages for me at a writers’ conference back in August and asked me to send him the whole manuscript. Now it remains to be seen if I can collect the $200. ('Course, after this post, my rejection will be rather public. <cringe> No. Positive thoughts. I'm )

Actually, a more public rejection could be good. We can all commiserate with you in that case. You have friends in your sorrow. Of course, if it makes it, we'll be insanely jealous and turn into bitter enemies. We're foul-weather friends.

Courier New is a mono-spaced font which only means that each letter takes up the same amount of space whether its an "i" or a "w." Times New Roman is not...

Thanks JB and Balthasar for bringing to my attention yet another of those little things I should really know about.

And just to further display my ignorance. I'm assuming when you say an ellipsis at the end of a paragraph should be made up of four dots, the same applies for an ellipsis at the end of a sentence also?

Another thing you should know about is how to us an em-dash--those dashes that set off a clause, like this one. And--in case you're wondering--those dashes that set off a parenthetical phrase, as in this sentence.

You SHOULD NOT put a space between the dash and the words -- like this -- because if your story is accepted, it makes the typesetter's job more difficult. And if your margins cut the dash in half, put a space between the word and the dash so that the dash stays together on the next line.

"I thought that might happen but. . ." he said.

Three dots or four? I'd expect three and without a comma but I'm beginning to think I'm probably wrong.

Crikey, how much trouble can three little dots be? I've never really thought about them before and just stuck them in without thinking about whether there were any rules regarding how they appear in the manuscript.

I did know about the em-dashes though but thanks for mentioning it just in case.

Welcome to the board, Corycdaughton, but what a boring place to begin.

Eric, <lightbulb goes on above head> I think I know why I got those hanging quotation marks. I don’t know what I can do about them, though. As I said, it happened only three times in all my 120,000 words, so it wasn’t easy to locate them again. I did find two, though, and both are immediately after a dash – which is apparently the whole problem.

Type the following in Courier New:
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. My name’s Cran—”
I don’t know if your margins will be exactly the same, so you might have to add or subtract letters to get the first keystroke that makes up the dash to be the last thing you can type on the line. If you do that, the last quotation mark will go to the next line – and it’ll be a beginning quotation mark, not an ending one.

Now, I’ve found that trying to end a quote with a dash, as when someone is cut off while speaking, is impossible if you type, as in this case, the letters C, r, a, n, then hit the hyphen twice for a dash, then the final quotation mark. You get a beginning quotation mark that’s turned the wrong way. So what I do is type C, r, a, n, hit the hyphen key twice, type any letter (to fill the space to fool the quotation mark coming up), then the last quotation mark, then backspace once with the arrow key (so I don’t delete anything yet), then backspace with the backspace key to delete whatever extra letter I added to fill the space before the quotation mark, and voila, I have a dash before a final quotation mark. Of course, if it comes at the end of a line, then the quotation mark travels to the next line all by its lonesome self.

So, because I was trying to solve the problem of ending a quote with a dash, I ended up with hanging end quotation marks when the line was full. And it’s not unique to Courier New. I just did it in TNR by adding extra letters to the same sentence. (Although I don’t ever remember doing it before in TNR. Never entered the perfect line, I guess.)

Wow.

You’re probably going to tell me the solution is some simple thing I didn’t think of and which could have saved me a lot of trouble, but that’ll be par for the course.

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In Times New Roman it seems to automatically increase the spacing between the dots but Courier New always scrunches them up and I had thought this made it a little awkward to read.

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Gwalchmai, I had this problem, too. In fact, when I did the four dots for sentence ends, it really looked stupid – three scrunched dots, a space, then another dot. It got so that I would read an abrupt stop in places I knew were trail-offs, so I went through and got rid of all the fourth dots, even though I knew they were more correct. But I’d seen just three used at ends of sentences, so I went with a less correct use but a more visually understandable configuration. And now JB says I could have turned off the scruncher. (Gotta find out how to do that.)

I must say, enter 120,000 words of text, and you do learn some things about your computer.

Oh. Looking over my earlier post, I had to chuckle. It occurred to me that someone even less informed than I am about computers or with a different system may think I have an assistant. I was referring, of course, to the little office assistant character Microsoft provides -- in my case, the cat.

A pat on the back to anyone who read through this whole post. Two pats if they understood it.

OK, I was able to reproduce it, and that's something that I don't think there's a setting to fix.

>>>>John sighed. "I just wish . . . ."

>>>>"I just wish . . ." John sighed.

You can also close an ellipsis with a question mark.

>>>>John looked at Ann. "Do you . . . ?"

That probably works better than this:

>>>> "Do you . . . ?" John asked, looking at Ann.

But this is a matter of style. The point is to keep all of this stuff as invisible as possible so the reader doesn't get pulled out of the fictional dream you're tyring to weave.

PS -- Other writers may have other ways of doing this kind of stuff. For example, Stephen King will sometimes end a sentence with a ?!? or a !?! or even a ??, none of which I care for, really. I find this stuff unnecessary because if the scene is written well (and most of King's scenes are), the mind naturally knows how something is said. And if you must emphasize dialogue, underlining (i.e., italizing), or putting it in ALL CAPS, or even both works best, I think.

But these are matters of little importance, I think, easily changed by editors with their own opinions.

Gwalchmai, I also tried to do a search for “…” and it didn’t work, either, so I combed through for them, which is why I wasn’t anxious to do it again for the hanging quotation marks (cousins, you know, of the hanging chad ). Repeat after me: “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.”

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- white bond paper (does it matter if it is 20lb or 24lb?)

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I don't think it matters to the editor, but if you use 24lb instead of 201b paper, your manuscript may require more stamps.

Huh? I don't know how you got what you got. I don't remember suggesting that an ellipsis and a dash are interchangeable. I hope I didn't! You're right, an ellipsis gives a sense of trailing away, where as a dash doesn't.

Eric, you are a two hundred and twenty seven hour saving genius! Thank you. Phew, I'm glad I don't have to go through all that again. I hate reading the same book three times back-to-back, even if it is my own.

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Welcome to the board, Corycdaughton, but what a boring place to begin.

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Maybe, but it has been quite an informative thread, and not just with reference to these damned ellipses. Quite a bit of information regarding submission guidelines in general really.

And I'll second that welcome while I'm at it.

I too have found this thread very helpful - things that matter that I had not thought of, and hadn't seen in submission guidelines.

I printed my current story in Courier New, on econofast (I get black streaks through the lower third of my words with my current printer, regardless of cleaning, aligning, or replacing the print cartridge, but at least on econofast they are lighter - still won't be able to submit anything printed on it). It sure looked odd, but after a while was easier to read with the spacing of the letters. I can see why an editor would prefer it, aside from the word count issue.

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Huh? I don't know how you got what you got. I don't remember suggesting that an ellipsis and a dash are interchangeable. I hope I didn't!

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But this is a matter of style….But these are matters of little importance, I think, easily changed by editors with their own opinions.

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It depends on how the dialogue is written. Compare: < your examples>

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As far as positioning making a difference with ellipses accompanied by their proper punctuation, it would probably be better to tweak the text to accommodate proper ellipsis use. For instance, in
<"Do you . . . ?" John asked, looking at Ann.>
John really didn’t ask, because he didn’t finish his question. Why not
<“Do you . . .?” John tried to ask the question, looking at Ann, but the words wouldn’t come.>

JB wrote

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Four dots, no space after the last word.

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To find scrunched dots, etc…. if you find one, you can copy & paste it into the search box. That should let you find & replace the rest of them.

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The three-dots thing is an autocorrect/autoformat option that Word does for you. (Ick. It's not even correct.) You can turn it off if you like.

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Other writers may have other ways of doing this kind of stuff. For example, Stephen King will sometimes end a sentence with a ?!? or a !?! or even a ??, none of which I care for, really. I find this stuff unnecessary because if the scene is written well (and most of King's scenes are), the mind naturally knows how something is said. And if you must emphasize dialogue, underlining (i.e., italizing), or putting it in ALL CAPS, or even both works best, I think.

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All caps probably wouldn’t be advisable, since underlining is what publishers want for indicating stressed words. However, I’m sure there are occasions when caps are acceptable – maybe a character is reading a letter in which certain words are in caps. Most likely, there are other odd instances.

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And it’s not unique to Courier New. I just did it in TNR by adding extra letters to the same sentence. (Although I don’t ever remember doing it before in TNR. Never entered the perfect line, I guess.)

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And if your margins cut the dash in half, put a space between the word and the dash so that the dash stays together on the next line.

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Econofast, best…I’ve learned something new again. This is a good thread.

<groan> Less should have been more...Hemingway must be haunting me.

1. Go to the Tools menu.
2. Choose AutoCorrect....
3. On the AutoCorrect tab, you should see a table with two columns. The first column shows a sequence of characters that will trigger AutoCorrect, and the second shows what will be used to replace that sequence.
4. One row of the table will show ... in the first column and the ellipsis character in the second column.
5. Select that row.
6. Click the Delete button.

Word will no longer replace ... with the ellipsis character.

While you're there, you might want to switch over to the AutoFormat as You Type tab and uncheck the box for replacing straight quotes with "smart quotes" (if , like me, you don't like "smart quotes.") You can also uncheck a box to prevent the replacing of -- with the dash character, if you don't like that being done automatically.

I've read about the different style books, but could someone tell me which one the sf/f publishers go by, or want us to use? Thanks!

There's an interesting discussion of dashes and ellipses here

http://www.mirror.org/terry.hickman/Ellipsis.html

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and I'm just discovering that in dashes you use TWO and no spaces, or something like that....

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Thanks, Eric. I’ll try it. I was in the auto-area earlier, but didn’t know what I could touch without screwing up my computer.

Wow. Info overload, Kathleen. Good stuff, though. Anyone know if any part of the following is a typo, because I don’t get it:

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As for dot-dot-dot: Chicago says to use three-to-em spaces between the dots

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Kolona - my husband is king of crossword puzzles, and his mind is a vast storehouse of useless knowledge. Except when a question like yours about "em" comes up! He said it had to do with printers and to do a particular search. I did, and here is one result:

http://www.apa-letterpress.org/Files/TP/Handset%20Type%202.html

" THREE-TO-EM SPACES are one-third the width of the square em quad. They are the standard word spaces used in regular text composition."

If you read the several entries on em spaces, it looks like it matters to printers. For us, it looks like three-to-em spaces are just our regular spaces!

I'm sure someone will correct me, and tell us about the spacing it refers to, and how we can do x, y, and z to get our spacing exactly correct! Problem is, I love using the three dots, and the dashes that set off text as you described.

Wah - all I wanted to do was write a story and send it somewhere and get paid without knowing obscure printers' references

I can say that an en-dash is equivalent to a hyphen, and an em-dash is equivalent to what people usually think of as a dash. (On a keyboard, you type the hyphen key once to indicate an en-dash and twice to indicate an em-dash.)

I still think Times New Roman is a lot easier to read.

(That example doesn't work since it's not in the offending font.}
[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited March 04, 2004).]

[This message has been edited by Kolona (edited March 04, 2004).]