A to Z - All About Writing: Basic Formatting

Welcome to the Blogging A to Z Challenge, where, this month, I'll be focusing on all things writing. This may be a random jumping around of topics within my theme, but hopefully something somewhere will be useful to someone. (V is for vague - see that last sentence.) Check out all the participants here and lets get on with today's letter.

B is for Basic Formatting

While this is something that seems like it should be common knowledge to anyone who has read books or taken high school English, I can easily say from reading the work of many beginning writers, it clearly is not. So today we're going to skim over the basics.

1.    Unless you're writing for posting on the internet, paragraphs should be indented somewhere between .3 and .5 inches depending on what formatting guides you happen to be following.

2. Dialogue (character's speaking) should be in a separate paragraph from general narrative. This makes the story far easier to read.

"If you see what I mean," she said.

3. Dialogue tags can either precede or follow dialogue. Following is most common. Tags denote who is speaking and should generally be kept to a simple he/she said rather than going nuts with using a hundred different words for 'said'. Said does the job and lets the dialogue do it's thing without being distracting. Tags should be formatted as above using a comma unless the dialogue is a question, in which case: "Was that a question?" she asked. It has also been debated that said can be used for questions in place of asked, but I find that distracting in most cases, so I prefer to stick with the common 'asked'.

4. Scene breaks are used to show a progression in time, or a change of pov or setting. A scene break in submission formatting is usually denoted by a blank line and a # and a blank line. In a printed book, it may have a decorative symbol or simply two blank lines.  Scene breaks are breaks within a chapter to show that something has changed from the previous portion and now we're onto something related, but new.

5. When writing dialogue it's fine to use slang, poor grammar and contractions. When writing narrative (the descriptive part of the story where people aren't talking), those should generally be avoided unless we're deep in a character's pov.

6. When submitting writing for publication, double spaced is the way to go unless you have been explicitly been told otherwise. Other things to hunt down specific submission guidelines on include, type of quotes preferred (straight or curly),  indent preferences, italics protocols, and font preference. Always check the guidelines.

7. Learn to use Word (or whatever program you use) properly to insert page numbers and title/author identifying headers. Both of these are easy google searches and take only a few minutes to figure out, if even that.

Got any basic formatting tips to share? Drop them in the comments.

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