I think I brought this up at some point in the recent past, but a F&F topic led me to want to reopen the discussion.
Letter formatting:
blah blah blah blah blah. # Dear so and so:
la di da di da
Sincerely,
me # yipideedodah
I don't think italics or anything special is necessary here, but please, if someone knows exactly how to format a letter for a finished manuscript, share your wisdom with us. I'm taking my best guess based on things I've heard in the past
Posted by Silver6 (Member # 1415) on :
Erm: as far as I know (I sent a couple, and no-one ever made any comments) here are the rules I used (but bear in mind I live on the other side of the pond, so it works in the UK)-the same for business letters: The date at the top right-hand corner. Skip a line, and at the right end of the paper, put the name of the recipient and his address. Skip a couple more lines. Aligned on the left, your name and address. Skip some more lines. Now it goes like that (everything is aligned on the left):
Dear so and so,
Here is...
Next paragraph
Next paragraph
etc.
Final paragraph
Yours sincerely, skip a couple lines here (you'll sign afterwards once you've printed the letter, or you can put an electronic signature) Your full name
The end
Posted by Eljay (Member # 1941) on :
I've always assumed that any of the accepted professional (as opposed to personal) styles of letter would be fine. I don't know if there's one style that's used more often than another.
Posted by GZ (Member # 1374) on :
I don't know if it's the official manuscript way to format a letter, but that's how I did it for the one letter story I did. I didn't get any comments on the formating being offensive.
Really -- how else would you do it? The formating that will make it stand out in the finished format isn't something that you can reproduce in manuscript form. Maybe the only other thing you could do would be to indent extra on either side, but I don't know if that is really necessary with the # page breaks already dividing it out from the regular text.
Posted by MaryRobinette (Member # 1680) on :
Since my story is the one that sparked this, I'll mention that part of the confusion was that there were one sentance quotes from the writing. So it would be something like,
"Dear So&So," I wrote, "Yes. blah, blah." Then I paused to consider.