Jessi's Guide To: Formatting Rules
Do you ever find yourself struggling with formatting academic essays or manuscripts? Here’s something to make your life a little easier. Instead of researching this yourself, I’m about to give you four different resources I refer to when I'm struggling with the format of my writing. The first two are sources I used in college for academic essays and the other two are resources I found only recently when considering how to format a manuscript for publication. Let’s start with the academic.
One of the must-haves in academic writing is the Chicago Manual of Style, which you can find on Amazon for approximately $60, but it's worth the price for the information. This book is filled with numerous formatting rules about citations and grammar that you can have and can use towards your academic career. It has a large variety of different formatting styles like MLA and Chicago style, just to name a few. You’ll find that many teachers and professors have a copy of this because it’s filled with so much information on writing and formatting. Not to mention it’s easy to reference. I know plenty of other writers who are not in the teaching career that utilize this to help guide them. Here’s the best part, though many use this as an academic reference, it has chapters that touch base on books and journalism. How cool is that? All in all, if you have decided to make writing a career, you may want to add this book to your collection.
If you don’t want to get your hands on the Chicago Manual of Style, than there’s a website you can use that I always went to while I was in college. You may have heard of it, but if not, it’s called Purdue OWL. It’s a website provided by Purdue University and it provides information on formatting rules for MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. Basically, it’s like an electronic version of the Chicago Manual of Style – it even has a page on that. Plus, it provides information on grammar, the writing process, academic writing – which includes how to structure an argumentative paper, active versus passive writing, and the list goes on. Not to mention it has information on how to format a manuscript – academic, not fiction – for submission. So this website yields plenty of useful information that you can use to survive college.
Now that you know some places to go for academic writing, where can you go for formatting manuscripts? This one is a little more difficult because different publishing agencies require different formats. You must first find out which publishing house would best compliment your style and genre. If you’re not certain as to which publisher would be best to approach, the annual Writer’s Market is the best way to do it. You can get it from Amazon for roughly $22, or check a library near you for a copy. After finding the publishing house you want to use check their website before submitting to them. Any specifications they have should be on their there. If not, here are a few articles you can go to:
The website First Manuscript has awesome information on formatting. It’s easy to read and to understand. They also provide sample pages of the manuscript formatting so you can see what your manuscript should look like.
Another good website to look at is William Shunn’s Proper Manuscript Format. This particular page is an example of what a manuscript page should look like. He has other articles aside from this one that go in depth about the difference between tab and indentation and how to format it to your manuscript. If you’re into poetry, he provides a manuscript format for a poetry collection among many other pages. I don’t want to spoil it all for you so go check it out.
Like I said, manuscript formatting for novels and creative works can be a little harder to keep up with since so many articles can have such differing views on what is important to follow. That’s why I, as well as many others that I have read, suggest that you make sure the publishing house or agency you want to submit your manuscript to doesn’t have their own guidelines. They’ll keep them up to date on what they want and expect. If they don’t, then these two websites are pretty good on keeping their information on recent developments.
These are just a few resources I have found to be useful in my writing career. They’re all really good on keeping things updated so you won’t miss out on any changes made to formatting rules. If you have any other suggestions, or any other good resources, leave a comment below. I’m always looking for something new to read.
