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Author Topic: Formatting question
TamesonYip
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For my wotf story, I have my MC post to an online forum (like 5 seperate posts all at once). In standard manuscript format, what is the best way to set that apart? Do I change fonts? Indent? Increase right margin? Italics? Thanks!
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Kathleen Dalton Woodbury
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In Vernor Vinge's FIRE UPON THE DEEP there is a lot of "internet" communication, and if I remember correctly, the publisher used a different font.

I don't know what he did in the manuscript, however--probably a style sheet, and that may be the best way to do it.

What you could also try is to format it more like a play script, where you have the name of the "poster" first with a colon as punctuation, and then what the poster posted.

USERNAME: And this is what I think about that.

That format is different enough from the regular text that it should be clear what you are doing. (Indenting such "posts" might be a good idea as well.)


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Betsy Hammer
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I'm not sure about this at all, but I think OSC told us in the writing class to center it and shrink the font to size 10. It was a long time ago, though, so don't trust me. He may have been talking about something else.
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EricJamesStone
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I would treat each post as a block quote. Start with a standard line break. Indent half an inch on both sides for the text of the forum post (including any post headers such as topic, date & author) and then another standard line break at the end of each forum post. After the final post, stop the extra indenting.

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Pyre Dynasty
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Ditto on the block quote thing. The tech-editor will figure out how it should work in print.
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TamesonYip
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Thanks!
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