The checklist version of this.
Formatting esoterica:
- Contact information in top left corner of first page (legal name, address, phone number, email, pronouns, writing affiliations)
- Word count (rounded to 100s) in top right corner of first page
- Header with your surname, an abbreviated version of your title, and the page number right aligned at the top
- Title of story a third/half way down the first page
- “by Author Name” the line below
- Blank line before starting the story
- Scene breaks denoted using # on its own line
- (Optionally include END at the end of the story)
Things you might need to do:
- 12 point font
- Standard, readable font like Times New Roman or Courier New
Things you probably don’t need to do:
- One inch margins
- White background, no color or decorations
- Black type only
- Double spaced
- Paragraphs indented a half inch from the left
- No extra lines between paragraphs
- Left aligned text, not justified
- Italics used for emphasis
- Dashes denoted with em dashes with no spaces around it
- Dialogue uses quotation marks, with a new paragraph per speaker
- Smart quotes used
- Only one space after periods