December 1, 2007
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NUTS AND BOLTS WEB SITE:
“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 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.”
