Contest Entry Manuscript Format

	Your primary goal should be to make things as easy as possible for the contest 

judges. The cardinal rule of contest manuscript formatting is to do everything in your 

power to avoid annoying the judges, who are a cantankerous lot anyway, thanks to all the 

poorly formatted contest manuscripts they must read.

DO NOT use fancy fonts.

DO NOT use colored ink.

DO NOT use colored paper.

DO NOT single-space the lines.

DO NOT justify the right margin.

• Use a nonproportional or monospaced font such as Courier (12-point) or Courier New
   
  (12-point). ("Nonproportional" or "monospaced" means that each letter should take up 
  
  the same space, whether it's an i or a w, an l or an m, just like you're using a 
  
  typewriter.) This document is in 12-point Courier. While creating your story you can 

    use whatever font style and size you desire, but when it comes to printing out the 

    final version to enter in the contest, please use Courier or Courier New 12-point.

• Use black ink on white, 8 1/2 inch X 11 inch standard paper only. (Foreign contestants 
  
  may use different size paper if that is all they have available.)

• Double-spaced lines--the judges may need room to make notations between lines, but not 
  
  too much room, so do not triple-space.

• The beginning of every paragraph in your manuscript should be indented five spaces 
  
  (one half inch) from the left margin.  Do not place extra double spaces between 
  
  paragraphs.  The indentation is sufficient to indicate that a new paragraph has begun.

• Wide margins (one inch on all four sides).

• Justify the text on the left margin only; leave your right margin ragged.

• Center three pound signs about an inch apart (#     #     #) between scene breaks. Do 
  
  not triple-space between paragraphs or insert graphics.

• Use single-sided, unstapled pages.

• Cover page: Your name, address, telephone number, e-mail address (if you have one), 
  
  contest name, and story title should appear at the upper left. It is not necessary to
  
  place your Social Security number anywhere on your manuscript.

• First page: Half-way down the page place the story title.

• Story pages: story title keyword(s) (one or two important words from the story’s title) 
  
  and the current page number on every page at the upper right, for example: 
  
  Contest Format/1, Contest Format/2, etc. The author’s name should not appear on any story 
  
  page. If the unbound pages happen to fall off the judges’ desks and become mixed up with 
  
  other manuscripts, the header helps the judge reassemble yours in the proper order.

• Indicate italics by using the italics feature in your computer program. If your program or
  
  typewriter is not italics capable, indicate italics like this with an underline.

• Word count: If your word processing software doesn't give you a word count, you can 
  
  estimate the total by counting the number of words on one page and multiplying by the 
  
  number of pages in the manuscript. If your manuscript makes it to the final stages of 
  
  winning contest entries, we will do an exact word count. All words count as words, so the
  
  words "a," "an," and "the" count as words. Hyphenated words are counted as one word.

#	#	#

	"No, but wait," you say.  "My characters are speaking to each other

telepathically, or near each other in six different languages, and I need to use several

typefaces, just to keep everything straight in my own head."

	Bzzzt!  Wrong!  Your characters are trying to tell you--in six telepathic

languages--that you haven't thought the story through.  The reader has a hard-won sense

of how these things work...and trying to shove a new standard down their throats won't 

work.

	Please go back and figure out a way to tell the story in standard manuscript

format; on the way, I'll bet you'll find and fix several other problems you may have

overlooked.