Couple of Oddball Formatting Questions

For italicized words, you underline everything including the spaces between words and the punctuation at the end of the sentence if the italics go that far. For your other question, I don't think you need to indent any further than normal, and you'd simply italicize (underline) the entire letter. Where's Reph when you need her?

To be honest, it might look better on the page if you have your character or narrator POV paraphrase the letter's content. That way you won't need an entire block of italics and it would be less intrusive on the read, if the letter is a long one that is.

Steve 211 said:

I understand that in a manuscript, you underline words to show that they should be italicized. But do you underline everything in the line, or just the words?

"No way!"

"No way!"

And if you quote a letter, as in, "Dear John," and a couple of paragraphs of heart-sucking insults, do you simply indent it more, while keeping the same Courier 12, double-spaced?

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You only underline the characters that are going to be italicized. If a whole sentence is italicized, its punctuation will be italicized as well.

Those are the simple cases. Beyond that, there are a lot of rules covering different circumstances that can arise. When you sell your manuscript to a publisher, they'll have a copyeditor go over it. That copyeditor knows the rules. What you have to do is make it easy to figure out what you meant to italicize and why. If you do that, they'll take care of the rest.

If you quote a letter or other excerpt, indent the whole thing, with an additional indent for paragraph starts. It should be double-spaced, just like the rest of the manuscript. Double spacing is so the editor or copyeditor can write in edits between the lines. Excerpts get edited too.

I don't see any reason to paraphrase letters as a matter of course. You can paraphrase them if you don't need the full text.

Hiya, Steve. Mind if I ask an oddball question in your thread?

I've been wondering about paragraph indents in a manuscript. I understand that in a finished book, a paragraph at the beginning of a chapter generally is not indented since it is not following another paragraph, and therefore does not need the indent to set it apart. I was wondering if the folks like Hapi who work in the industry could tell us what the preference is for a submitted manuscript? Should the first paragraph of a chapter be indented or not, or does it even matter?

ChunkyC said:

I've been wondering about paragraph indents in a manuscript. I understand that in a finished book, a paragraph at the beginning of a chapter generally is not indented since it is not following another paragraph, and therefore does not need the indent to set it apart. I was wondering if the folks like Hapi who work in the industry could tell us what the preference is for a submitted manuscript? Should the first paragraph of a chapter be indented or not, or does it even matter?

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Indent it so they can tell what it is. Hope they don't indent it in the typeset version. Correct it if they do, and see what happens.

Thx, Hapi.