Present Your Manuscript in a Professional Way

Lorraine Gane

After you’ve spent months and perhaps years working on your manuscript to ensure the shape is cohesive and the content is clear and concise, it’s time to submit the work to an editor or publisher. Yet you may not know all the steps to do this. The following blueprint will guide you through this next phase so the process is easy and enjoyable. You will also save an editor hours of work (and save your money) by submitting a clean, well-ordered manuscript that adheres to submission guidelines. Set aside a couple hours for this stage so your work is unhurried. As the poet Rumi said, “Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe.”

1. The first step is to open your Word document so you can set the font type (often Times Roman), font size (12 point), line spacing (usually double-spaced), and margins (generally one inch) according to the publisher’s guidelines, which can often be found online. Set language to English: Canadian (from the Tools menu. Make sure you have not checked the box beside “Do not check spelling or grammar”). Unless you are proficient at formatting, keep it simple so a designer won’t have to undo your efforts. Remember to insert page numbers.

2. After this you can run your manuscript through a checklist to ensure consistency throughout. You can use Control F for this or go to the icons (Find, Replace, and Select) on the right side of the top menu. Items on this list can include:

• The use of hyphenated compounds (i.e., “a tenyear-old boy,” “low- and medium-income families”). • The correct use of quotation marks: punctuation within, not outside quotes; single quotation marks within a quotation. • Serial commas: (“red, white, and blue”). • Ellipses: three periods to indicate omitted material; use four periods at the end of a sentence. • Dashes: en (–) dashes for ranges in dates; em dashes (—) for all else (don’t use hyphens). • Spaces after periods: make sure there is one instead of two. • Spaces between paragraphs and at the end of sections and chapters. • Capitalization of titles and subtitles. • Block quotes for quotations of more than eight lines. • Whole numbers: spell out from one to 100 and before hundred, thousand, million. Use numerals for other numbers. • Italics for titles of books, films, long musical compositions, newspapers, magazines. Quotation marks for titles of stories, articles, poems. • Errors you tend to make, such as “your” rather than

“you’re”; “over” rather than “more than”; “further” rather than “farther”; “its” rather than “it’s”; “affect” rather than “effect.”

3. Once you’ve completed this you can spell check the entire document.

It’s wise to provide the editor or publisher with a style sheet stating the dictionary you used, plus the spelling of proper names, including geographical locations and difficult spellings so they don’t have to check them.

Look your document over one last time for anything you may have missed.

To help with the preparation of your manuscript, a good reference guide is invaluable. I recommend The Canadian Writer’s Handbook (Messenger and de Bruyn, Prentice Hall), The Chicago Manual of Style (The University of Chicago Press), or one I’ve used for more than twenty-five years, The Writer’s Hotline Handbook (Michael Montgomery and John Stratton).

From my experience with my own writing and working on the manuscripts of others, this stage of completion can bring immense rewards, among them the satisfaction of a job well done. And by presenting your manuscript to others in a professional way, you honour your writing and the result is often beneficial in small and large ways.

Lorraine Gane is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor. Her latest poetry collection is Arc of Light (Raven Chapbooks, 2020). She mentors writers through courses, workshops, and manuscript development/editing. www.lorrainegane.com.