White Space = Reader Relief Everything we do as writers should be done for the Reader. Without readers, we aren't writers. Show consideration to those on the other side of the monitor screen or page. To make the reader comfortable: 1 Keep your sentences short less than 15 words if possible. The punctuation mark of a solid black round shape is the reader's friend. Use them, use them often. Avoid convoluted sentences. 2 Keep paragraphs short less than 150 words, if possible. 3 When making hardcopy submissions, try to keep a line of typing less than 12 words. Editors consider one word is five letters on average. At 10 words per line, that's roughly 60 spaces on non-compensating typewriters. Lines longer than 12 words become wavy for the reader and he will wish for a straight-edge to be certain he stays in the right row. Editors also like wide margins to make notations it's your blood they're spilling. We are fortunate what Renderosity does for us here in the Forum with line length, less fortunate in the Writers Gallery. 4 Indented paragraphs are easier on the eye, but with the many wildly different writing software packages out there, we are stuck with extra-line between paragraphs. 5 If you have a choice, never use sans-serif letters serifs are the little blobs and mini-barbs on individual letters (sans = without). IBM pushed sans-serif as "economical." Maybe, but it is not pleasing to the eye; eye-fatigue sets in earlier with sans-serif. PLEASE THY READER! Dick aka drace68

Hi Dick/drace - Thanks for these tips! Just a couple of comments: #3 - I'm not sure about editors, who I guess have their own requirements for a page of text, but I recently read that non-justified (i.e. ragged right) text is actually easier to read than fully justified text. I don't recall whether the study found that this applied to professionally typeset text, but it was defnitely true for the abysmal justification applied by most word processers. #4 - Most word processors let you customize how line spacing is handled rather extensively. What tool are you using that won't let you eliminate the space between paragraphs?

Hi Jimdoria, Yes, ragged right is proper. What I meant was margin for the maximum line's length. And as for the extra line space between paragraphs, all programs I know let you do this. But not all websites recognize left indentation as a paragraph start. Therefore, by default, we use the extra line. Dick