Word For Authors: What Not To Do

A well organized Word document will make turning your work into a Kindle or print book far easier if you simply follow some basic suggestions. This post is all about what not to do.

  • Never use the tab key. Never use it to indent a paragraph. Never use it to move a line to the right for any reason at all. Just don’t use it - period.
  • Never use the space bar to move words on the page. Never use the space bar to indent a paragraph. 
  • Avoid using the enter key to create a blank line between paragraphs. If you want a break between paragraphs, insert asterisks instead — a single blank line looks more like a mistake than an intentional pause in the narrative.
  • Do not use the Enter key to advance to a new page. Use Ctrl-Enter instead. That automatically creates a page break which never has to be adjusted if you edit your work. (If you have a Mac, my sympathies - it is Shift-Command-Enter.)
  • If you’re a poet, I’ll have a special post just for you about how to handle stanzas. 
  • Stop using two spaces after punctuation. This is not only no longer needed, it creates problems on ereader devices. Scrivener and LibreOffice both have menu options to remove them and Word and Google docs makes it easy to get rid of them using Find & Replace. It’s part of my process when I format a work for publication.
  • Avoid inserting tables. Tables do not render well on the Kindle devices. Many people use the Kindle app on their phone and there just isn’t enough space. Even a print book, often sized between 5 x 8 to 6 x 9, doesn’t have a lot of space for tables after you consider the margins. Figure out some other way to express the data.

Don’t fuss too much about the look of your working document. Make it comfortable for you, but don’t spend too much time trying to make it look fancy. I’ll have posts about how to set up your document, before you type a single word, that will make your writing environment easier to work with and make your formatting process smoother.

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