5 Do's & Don'ts for Formatting, Grammar, and Spelling

5 Do's and Don'ts for Formatting, Grammar, and Spelling

At Outskirts Press, our passion is helping you publish the book of your dreams. And you can help! Even
though we will strive to ensure that your book is perfect when it is done, there are little things you can
do with your manuscript now that will go a long way toward helping us publish a perfect book later. Just
five little things...

1. Don't insert hard paragraph breaks after every line. You can see where hard

returns are in your Microsoft Word document by holding down CTRL-SHIFT-8. That bold "paragraph
symbol" shows you where the hard returns are. They should be only at the ends of paragraphs.

2. Don't manually insert hyphens. Your word processor should hyphenate words

automatically, unless you have that function turned off. But even turning off auto-hyphenation is
preferable to manually inserting a hyphen yourself. A manually inserted hyphen will cause all sorts of
problems during interior book formatting, so be sure to remove them from your manuscript before
submitting it to us.

3. Don’t use ALL CAPS. You may be tempted to capitalize words for emphasis, or for book

titles. In both instances, italics are preferred.

4. Do spell check your work. All word processors have built-in spell checking. Even if you

plan on having us professionally edit your manuscript before publication (which we STRONGLY
recommend; oops, I mean strongly recommend), it is a good idea to run your spell check program on your
manuscript prior to submitting it to us, just to fix all the “easy” errors.

5. Do check your grammar. Most word processors also have built-in grammar checking,

although they are admittedly poor. There are better (and free) alternatives on the Internet. Our
favorite is Online-SpellCheck.com. Simply cut and paste your manuscript, a chapter at a time, into the
online form and Online-SpellCheck will not only identify spelling errors your word processor probably
missed, but it will also catch other common grammatical errors such as contextual misspellings,
commonly switched words, typographical errors, and more.

Even if you plan on ordering our optional editing service to have your manuscript professionally edited,
this procedure with Online-SpellCheck is an important one to complete prior to submitting your
manuscript to us. And if you choose to forgo our optional editing services (which we recommend
against), this step with Online-SpellCheck.com is basically mandatory. It's quick and free, so do your
future readers a favor and double-check your manuscript now.

Special Note: Be sure to bookmark Online-SpellCheck.com when you are there, so you can access it

during the production phase at Outskirts Press. You will be entering information into your Publishing
Center (like your synopsis, back cover copy, and online sales copy). It's best to run those paragraphs
through Online-SpellCheck.com before submitting them to us during the pre-production process.

Additionally, there is a popular Chrome extension to consider: Grammarly (at www.grammarly.com).
This browser extension runs in the background on the Chrome Internet browser and checks spelling
and grammar "on the fly" as you enter words into online forms. This is very useful for completing your
publishing process error-free.

Obviously, there is no substitute for a professional human editor, but complementing our professional
editing services with Online-SpellCheck and Grammarly is the perfect hat trick to almost guarantee an
error-free book.