I've always been surprised by how many students don't seem to think much about the appearance of their work. But consider that your reader's first impression of your work will come from its physical appearance. Careless errors and sloppiness send the message that you do not take your own work seriously. And if you don't why should anyone else?

This section presents generic Nuts and Bolts guidelines for mechanics, for -how formal work should look. Use these guidelines if you're not writing to any of the formats presented earlier (MLA, etc.). The general formats presented here should be satisfactory to most teachers, and once you have learned them it will be quite easy to adapt them if necessary.

In the United States, use white, unlined 8.5" by 11" paper. Essays should be stapled or paper-clipped in the upper left corner. Don't use binders or plastic covers unless your teacher wants them, nor should you hold your paper together by folding or tearing pages.

Margins, spacing, and indentation

Use margins of at least one inch and no more than one and a quarter inches on all sides. The essay or report should be double-spaced throughout (including quotations, notes, and the list of works cited), with no blank lines between paragraphs and the first line of each new paragraph indented a half-inch on the left.. (Some teacher prefer blank lines between paragraphs: in such cases, don't indent the first line.)

Printing and fonts

Type or print, don't handwrite formal work. Avoid things like page numbers or your name by hand. Use a plain serif or sans-serif font—no cursive fonts, for instance. Popular serif choices are Times Roman and Palatino; popular san-serif choices are Arial and Helvetica. Print in black ink.

Pagination

Starting with the first page, put page numbers a half-inch from the top or bottom edge of the paper and flush with the right margin. Type your last name before the page number (Smith 1), in case the page comes loose. Word processors automate this process, so make sure you know how to use the pagination command.

Spaces between sentences

In the old days of typewriters and nonproportional fonts (in which every letter, from i to w, takes up the same space), the rule was to put two spaces between sentences to improve readability. But if you print from a computer, you should put just one space between sentences. And speaking of spaces, in the course of revising, cutting and pasting one always ends up with extra spaces strewn throughout a paper. I recommend doing a global find-and-replace when you're done: let the word processor find and replace every extraneous two-space combination with a single space.

Title and identification

Make sure your essay has a title. It should not be italicized or put in quotation marks (if you are giving the title of a book or essay, or using a quotation in your title, then you use the appropriate style). The title should be more than a bare-bones identifier (like Essay #1 or Essay on Management). It should signal to the reader what your essay is about (like Deming's Total Quality Management Perspective or Jefferson on Slavery).

A common academic device to create a bit of elegance is to use a title and subtitle, separating them with a colon. Typically the titles are balanced so that one is broad and the other narrow, or one uses a key term and the other starts to delimit and explain it:

Often you'll see a pithy quoted fragment before the colon:

Besides the title, you need to put your name, the date, the professor's name, and the course title (including section).

For short essays you may or may not have a separate title page, depending on whether your teacher expects it.

Late corrections

Sometimes you will discover mistakes in what you thought was a final draft, when you no longer have time to print out a corrected version. In such cases, you should hand-correct the printed version (that's one reason to double-space essays). It's usually okay to turn in an essay with one or two such corrections. How to do it: Cross out the mistake with a single horizontal line. Mark the insertion point with a caret (^). Neatly write in the correction above the printed line. Don't write below the line or in the margin. If you need to make a more substantial correction, make a clean printout.

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