Standard Form for your Papers

Standard Form for your Papers W. Webb Westchester Academy--SBISD
(Just as in "real life," there are exceptions to all the rules listed below. The better you write and/or the better your web pages or other multimedia, the more exceptions to which you're entitled. (The writer e.e. cummings, who wrote almost everything--and made money at it--without capitalizing anything, knew how to spell and use good grammar. He had an earned right to his style.)
This page was originally put together for paper-based projects. Most of the rules are equally applicable to projects which do not use paper as the medium.
1	We use Apple's Pages word processor with the iMacs in our class. Pages may very well be a better word processor than the "standard", Microsoft Word. Pages is certainly more powerful. But Word has become a standard--even on the Mac platform, so we all need to be familiar with it. You can actually save a "paper" as an HTML file directly from Word or Pages, making it useable as a web page, although there are better programs to make web pages than word processors.
2	Set all your margins (top and bottom and left and right) at 1 inch.
3	The style manuals require that your work be double-spaced. I prefer 1 1/2 spaced. Adding the spacing does a couple of things. First, the text is easier to read. The easier it is to read, the easier it is for your teacher to read, and the better your grade tends to be. Second, it's easier to grade--there's less room for the teacher to make notes on your printout. There's another extra--the narrower line spacing makes it more difficult for the teacher who's grading your paper copy to write in notes, and generally, the more notes your teacher writes on your paper, the lower your grade!
4	Do not indent the beginning of a paragraph. Instead, skip a line between paragraphs. Because a paragraph is (or should be) a separate thought, it needs to be separate on the page. Disclaimer: If you're enrolled in AP U.S. History and AP English, check with your teacher for the style he or she prefers. They may very well prefer that you use indented style, 12 point Times New Roman and double spacing.
5	Use the 10 point Times New Roman font in the body of your paper. Times New Roman is a "serif" font--that is, it has those little lines, or serifs, at the top and bottom of each letter. The serifs help your eyes move horizontally across the page, and make your writing easier to read. You should always use a serif font in paragraphs. Because a serif font makes sentences and paragraphs easier to read, your teacher may not so easily notice small mistakes, and your grade may be better! Times New Roman is also a proportional font--its letters vary in width, and they look good on the page.
6	You may (should) use a "sans serif" or non-serif font in headings, subheadings and lists. We want people to stop and read such things word-by-word. And non-serif fonts, because they are slightly more difficult to read, make the reader slow down to read the words. Examples of good non-serif fonts are Arial and Comic Sans. Arial is quite plain and looks best in boldface. Don't use the Arial Black font, though--it's too bold and looks "smudged." Comic Sans is especially good if the subject is unpleasant to the reader. Its rounded letters tend to keep people from getting angry at you. If you use Comic Sans in light blue with a pale-tinted background, that's even better.
7	Use black letters on white "paper" for most uses. If you're being fancy, or if you want your document to be extra impressive, use a medium to dark shade of blue. Unlike when we print on paper, the cost to print on the screen is zero, no matter what colors we use. (Actually, the research seems to indicate that the easiest-to-read is a combination of very pale green "paper" and medium-to-dark green type.)
8	If you wish to emphasize something, use italics instead of underlining. With materials written with a computer, underlined words are phrases are reserved for Internet or other types of links.
9	NEVER USE ALL CAPS AND/OR RED PRINT, ESPECIALLY BOLDFACE! All caps are hard to read--we use the differences in heights of letters to decipher words--and red print is impolite--you are, in effect, SHOUTING at your reader.
10	Check your grammar and spelling. Be careful, though, with the grammar checker built into Word. Grammar checkers don't work very well because the English language is more complex than the grammar checker. Whatever you do, get your apostrophes right!
11	Each written page must have a heading containing your name on the left, Westchester Academy in the center, and the class name on the right. Each page must also have a footer with the page number at the right.