Professional writers have to deliver their words in a form that makes subbing and design easy. Here are 10 rules to follow for professional presentation.

• Put your name on everything because editorial offices are busy, and text can get separated from a covering letter or detached from an email. Make sure every document you supply, either on paper or electronically, includes your name and basic contact details.
• Use wide margins and double spacing so that it’s easy to mark notes and corrections on a printed version of your text.
• Put the date on your article so that’s easy to see how fresh the story is, and whether time-sensitive references need changing. If your article refers to events that happened ‘last week’ it’s important to know which week it’s talking about.
• Make the end obvious. In the days of typewritten text, every page had ‘more follows’ or ‘ends’ to ensure nothing was lost. With electronic documents that’s less important, but it makes sense to clearly mark the end of the text as a double-check.
• Don’t embed pictures into text files. If you’re submitting pictures, send them as separate files. If you import them into a text file it makes them much harder to use.
• Don’t use formatting in electronic documents. Submit the simplest possible text, because that’s the easiest for subs and designers to work with. If you change font sizes, use bold or italics, centering, justification, automatic numbering/bullet points, tables or any other clever formatting, it will probably be lost when the copy is imported into QuarkXPress or InDesign. And it instantly marks you out as an amateur. The only formatting I use is a ‘space after’ to separate paragraphs, making it easier to read them – better than leaving a blank line in the copy, which a sub has to edit out later. Otherwise, leave design for the designers.
• Keep tables simple. If you need to supply a table, don’t use a Word Table and don’t try to format the data so the text lines up in columns by adding spaces. Often a good strategy is to press the ‘tab’ key once between each column – if the columns don’t line up don’t worry, the subs will fix it. But different publications have different preferences.
• Don’t double-space between sentences whatever you might have been told in the past. Subs have to take ’em out again.
• Be consistent. Every publication has (or should have) a style book detailing its preferences of style and spelling. If you don’t know the preferences for the publication you’re sending copy to, at least aim to be consistent – choose a style a stick to it. Better still, find out what the publications’ preferences are and use them.
• Use spellcheckers, but don’t rely on them. An automated spelling checker will find most basic typing errors. What it won’t do is spot errors where you’ve used the wrong homonym (words that sound the same but have different meanings, eg their/there, hear/here, write/right) and it won’t spot a typing error which turns the word you wanted into another valid word (eg typing ‘coat’ instead of ‘cost’ or ‘rave’ instead of ‘race’). So it’s important to read your copy carefully.