What are some common document formatting debates and/or mistakes?

November 16, 2020 7:00 AM

In the spirit of the unique hell that is final exams in 2020... I'm curious about grammar/document formatting, and best practices. For instance, today I learned about the indentation debate (ie., indenting the first line of a new paragraph OR putting line break between two paragraphs, but never both. Source

And then, of course, is the debate over using one space or two spaces after new sentences.

What other English-language document formatting debates are out there? What are some common mistakes?

posted by Anonymouse1618 to Writing & Language (12 answers total)

Best answer: The difference between an en dash and em dash is particularly confusing.
posted by saeculorum at 7:23 AM on November 16, 2020 [5 favorites]

Oxford comma
posted by XtineHutch at 7:45 AM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]

This is kind of lateral to your question, but appropos, if your goal is to get good grades: some people say that people who use serif fonts like Times New Roman or Georgia get better grades than people who use non serif fonts like Helvetica or Arial. E.g., see Do serif fonts get you better grades?
posted by Transl3y at 7:47 AM on November 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

Adding an 's' to the possessive of words that already end in 's,' like Thomas' hat vs Thomas's hat

Whether to put punctuation inside or outside quotation marks

Splitting infinitives, starting sentences with conjunctions, or ending them with prepositions

Singular 'they'
posted by box at 7:52 AM on November 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Matthew Butterick lists a number of typewriter habits : typographical practices which are still common, but only exist because of the limitations of old mechanical typewriters. For example:

* Straight quotes rather than curly quotes
* Using more than one word space at a time
* Using carriage returns to insert vertical space

I really recommend his site Practical Typography; everything he tells you is clearly explained, and he lets you know exactly how to do better – with the tools provided by MS Word or whatever.
posted by vincebowdren at 8:00 AM on November 16, 2020 [6 favorites]

Left-aligned text versus justified text. Justified text looks far better to my eyes, but left-aligned is the default in Microsoft Word and most other word processors.
posted by jedicus at 8:04 AM on November 16, 2020

Best answer: One common mistake I see in document formatting is using Excel as a page-layout program. This is actually not so much a disease as a syndrome that takes many specific forms. They're all bad.

A best practice that is not widely used is stylesheets. Practical Typography (to which, +1 on that recommendation) does have a section on them; it's pretty far down, which suggests that it's an advanced or obscure topic, but it really should be regarded as the starting point for document formatting, IMO. Most of the time, we shouldn't be manually applying font formats at all; we should be using a canned stylesheet and applying the styles in it.

A formatting caveat that everyone who creates complex documents in MS Word should keep in mind is that auto-numbered lists are not your friend. This is not because automatic numbering is bad per se, it's because Word is bad, and tends to get confused about numbering.

If you are placing images or other elements that can exist outside the flow of text in your document (even if you don't intend for them to be outside the flow of text), there are a lot of ways to format them them incorrectly and only a few ways to format them correctly. A full investigation of the right and wrong ways to place images is beyond the scope of this comment.
posted by adamrice at 8:31 AM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Widows & orphans - which is how your paragraphs are allowed to split over page breaks. You probably don't want a single line of a paragraph that's all alone either at the top or the bottom of the page, but nor do you want an odd-looking expanse of white space where it looks like a paragraph could reasonably fit.

Rivers - if you're trying to justify text on a relatively short row, then the resulting larger gaps between words can sometimes line up in distracting patterns of white space that flow vertically. This is Bad - and left-alignment is probably the answer (sorry, jedicus). Intentional white space is your friend, but this kind is not.

Hyphenation - you'll want reasonable minimum & maximum sizes for the chunks of words that might ever fall either side of the hyphen. You'll also want to be careful about where you hyphenate certain words (therapist being a common example).

Please never type multiple spaces where there should be a tab. In fact: never more than one space, never more than one tab, never more than one newline/carriage return. I learned to format documents in WordPerfect, and oh my god the redundant duplicated crap that you'd discover when you turned on "reveal codes" in someone else's document would turn your hair white.

+1 to styles - any doc of more than trivial layout complexity will be easier overall if you use styles
posted by rd45 at 9:30 AM on November 16, 2020 [7 favorites]

Margins also get arguments - some have Strong Opinions and some just use whatever the program sets as a default.

Clever (and lazy) students often take advantage of instructions like "three page essay/report on..." by tweaking the margins by 1/4" , changing the line height to 2.1 instead of double-spaced, upping the font size by a half-point (and picking the font with the widest letters) (Courier, with Bookman Old as the backup), and various other "make the same text fill more page space" tricks.

Image formatting is tricky. Table formatting is tricky. Columns are tricky. Anything where you want the text to stay in the middle or bottom of the page is tricky. There are debates about all these topics, with one faction insisting "[Here] is the exact and correct list of features for addressing this," another faction insisting, "Whatever Word uses as its default is correct," and any number of other groups advocating for "[Here] is what I use because Reasons."

Troublesome features in Word: Numbers/Bullet lists, as mentioned. Section breaks. (Occasionally Word will scramble section breaks very badly and you'll have to remove all of them and replace them manually. It sucks.) Footnotes. Columns. (Columns are made with section breaks.) Tables. Images with captions. Table of Contents. Comments (which can't be left in text boxes, headers, or footers.) Text boxes. Internal bookmarks. Tabs, especially center-aligned tabs. Tabs inside tables; I weep.

Typography debates: Hyphenation. Hyphen vs en-dash vs em-dash. Apostrophes for plural dates and acronyms. (70's vs 70s; PhD's vs PhDs). (Experts insist 70s is correct. I think they're going to lose that fight.) Whether to put periods in acronyms; where to put an "s" at the end. One or two spaces after a period. (Two is a holdover from typewriter days.) How to make ellipses: ... vs … vs . . . Whether/when to use four dots in an ellipsis. Punctuation in or outside of quotes. Semicolons. Accent marks. How to format long quotations.

Grammar debates: Singular they/them. Ending sentences with prepositions. Beginning sentences with conjunctions. Splitting infinitives. Passive voice. Clichés. Single-sentence paragraphs. Very long paragraphs.

For academic purposes: Find your school's standards and use those, and ignore "best" typography etc. discussions. It doesn't matter what's "correct"; it matters what won't get your grade reduced.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:47 AM on November 16, 2020 [4 favorites]

Since you mentioned final exams, I will say that the thing that drives me right up the wall is when I explicitly say that finals need to be handed in as MS Word, RTF, or Pages documents, and I get sent PDFs and links to google docs (and before anyone yells at me, my university provides access to Word for all students).

It's worth noting, also, that quite a few word processing programs inexplicably default to 1.25" margins, when 1" is standard in most academic formatting styles. If your questions are practical, the Purdue OWL formatting instructions are admirably comprehensive.
posted by dizziest at 9:55 AM on November 16, 2020

In a word processor, using spaces to indent the first line of a paragraph, rather than setting the first line indentation through a formatting command (via the ruler or a formatting menu). Related to this, using spaces to indent text or tabular data rather than using tab stops.

These might not be visible to readers, but they will definitely be visible (and probably annoying) to editors. And they might be visible to readers, if you don't get the number of spaces just right. For tabular, it's actually often impossible to get things to line up by using spaces because in most fonts different letters have different widths.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 10:45 AM on November 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

One of the most common document formatting mistakes is not using L^AT_EX.

That's not the glib observation it sounds like; sometimes the right tool for a given job is using a typesetting language rather than a word processor. Choosing the former can relegate a number of the issues mentioned upthread to the category of things you never need to worry about again.
posted by sourcequench at 2:27 PM on November 16, 2020 [1 favorite]