We told our pre-editors to take out all the tabs (see notes on Style – you don’t need tabs to indent your paragraphs, and you’re really much better off without them). We told you tabs break ebooks. But what if you’re not writing an ebook. What are tabs good for? Well…
Continue reading Tips and Tricks with WordGUESS WHAT!
You don’t need to indent your paragraph with a tab, or separate paragraphs with a blank line, or use two spaces after a period, or retype your whole document to submit to an anthology that requires 1.5 line spacing, or indent lines of poetry with three, four, five spaces (and lose count), or …
Continue reading Using Word with StyleHere’s the current Writers’ Mill Style Guide, developed over several years of creating the Writers’ Mill Journal. The aim (for editors) is to edit invisibly.
Continue reading Writers’ Mill Anthology Style GuideThe Playlist Creators for our anthology will use the Navigation pane in Word to move entries around. If you use Heading 3 for the titles of stories and poems (or chapters in your novel), then you have Heading 2 and Heading 1 “spare” to play with. Use Heading 2 to create sections or parts of the book. You’ll probably (maybe) remove these later), but they allow you to drag everything in a particular section from where it is to a new location in the book. All the images and text, from this Heading 2 to the next Heading 2, will move together – no need to cut and paste!
Continue reading How to Use the Navigation PaneWord is a word processor, not a layout program, and real layout programs like InDesign will do a better job. But… you probably haven’t got InDesign on your computer, and you probably do have Word. So…
Continue reading Lay out your book with WordWith thanks to all the members who offered advice, questions, comments and more, most people present learned something during our “efficient use of Word” meeting, so now we just have to try not to forget it all. To that end, Sheila has added (she hopes) everyone’s suggestions to the file she was working from, and uploaded the file in DOCX and PDF format to our website.
Efficient Use of WORD, word doc: https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-Efficient-Use-of-WORD.docx
Efficient Use of WORD, PDF: https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The-Efficient-Use-of-WORD.pdf
If you want to know what we did at the meeting, and if you want to use WORD more efficiently, please follow the links and download the files. Then you’ll be able to follow through all the actions and add to your own skillset.