Thinking with Type_ A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students - PDF Room

appendix | 213

No matter how brilliant your prose, an editor will discover errors

in spelling, grammar, consistency, redundancy, and construction.

Only an editor can see beyond a writer’s navel.

The time you spend fiddling with formatting will be spent again by the editor and/or

designer, removing extra keystrokes. Provide flush left copy, in one font, double-spaced.

Writers should not over-format their texts.

Don’t use the space bar to create indents (just key in a single tab), and don’t use extra

spaces to create centered effects or layouts (unless you really are E. E. Cummings).

The space bar is not a design tool.

One of them is dotting your i’s with hearts and smiley faces. The other is leaving two

spaces between sentences. In typesetting, one space only must be left between sentences.

Some lessons learned in high school are best forgotten.

Each time a file is “corrected,” new errors can appear, from problems with rags, justification,

and page breaks to spelling mistakes, missing words, and botched or incomplete corrections.

Every change threatens to introduce new errors.

Changes made after a printer’s proof has been made (blue line, press proof, or other)

are expensive. They also will slow down your project, which, of course, is already late.

Don’t wait for the proofs to seriously examine the typeset text.

Famous last words: “We’ll catch it in the blue lines.”

take it slow