In a fixed-width font (such as Courier New), the characters
are all the same width: an “i” is the same width as an “m”. This makes the font
harder to read.The computer is not a typewriter; it gives us access to all of the same typographical resources that evolved over centuries in the printing industry. However, many people learned to type on a typewriter and haven’t gotten rid of their “typewriter habits”. What follows is a guide to some typographic principles for writing on the computer. The generalization is: if you don't see it in a well-printed book, it shouldn't be in your computer-generated manuscripts.
You don’t have to follow these guidelines, but they do represent standard usage.
Proportional fonts
There are two kinds of fonts: “Fixed-Width” and “Proportional”.
In a fixed-width font (such as Courier New), the characters
are all the same width: an “i” is the same width as an “m”. This makes the font
harder to read.
In a proportional font (such as Times or Arial), the characters are different widths. Typesetters have always used proportional fonts, and they look much more professional. Always use proportional fonts unless you have a specific reason not to!
In a proportional font, the period is squished over to the left of its space. Therefore you don’t need to type two spaces after a period, and in fact you shouldn’t: this leads to too much space. Get rid of your typewriter habit of typing two spaces after a period.
Serifs
Fonts come in two styles: “serif” and “sans-serif”. Times
New Roman is a serif font; Arial is sans-serif. Serifs are the little lines
at the ends of strokes.
This text is probably in a sans-serif font
This text is probably in a serif font
Serif fonts are easier to read on paper; for instance, they distinguish capital I and small L, which are confounded in many sans-serif fonts. However, since a computer monitor display has much lower resolution than most printers, sans-serif fonts may be easier to read on screen; serifs tend to look fussy. Use serif fonts most of the time for work that will be printed, sans-serif for screen presentation.
Large headings are more flexible: you can use a different font for these. However, try not to use more than two fonts in a document.
Emphasis
You should never use ALL CAPS (hard to read, and interpreted as “shouting”). If you want something similar for a title or gloss (but not for paragraph text!), use SMALL CAPS (you can get this effect automatically in Word: it’s under Format | Font).
Similarly, underlining is out (cuts off descenders, hard to read). Underlines and caps were devices used by typewriters in the absence of other alternatives; fortunately we no longer need stoop so low. Use italics or bold for emphasis.
Paragraphs
To reiterate the point made under styles: always use indenting (a paragraph format attribute) instead of tabs to indent paragraphs, and paragraph spacing instead of blank lines to separate paragraphs. This will make reformatting your document much easier. Consider that one of the most common changes people make to a paper is to change it from single-spaced to double-spaced and vice versa. Now, a single-spaced paragraph should have extra space above it and no indent, while a double-spaced paragraph should be indented but have no extra space. If you have controlled your indenting and paragraph spacing with styles, you won’t have to search and replace those extra blank lines and tab characters to make this change.
Punctuation
Another
bit of “typewriter residue” is the use of straight quotes (")
instead of curly quotes (“,”), and a “double dash” (--)
instead of an “em dash” (—). The characters you need for the
elegant version aren't available from the keyboard, but they are present in
ANSI fonts.
Luckily, Word can insert them automatically for you, and this option is on by default. Check the options in Tools | Autocorrect | Autoformat as you type under “Replace as you type”. (If you're like me you'll want to turn on the options for quotes, ordinals, fractions, and symbols, and turn off everything else on this sheet; the other options can lead to some unintended results.)
Sometimes you'll need to replace all the “curly quotes” in a document with “straight quotes”, or vice versa: since the curly quotes aren't in the standard ASCII character set they can cause problems in Unix-based e-mail programs, for instance. You can use Edit | Replace to solve the problem, but the procedure isn't obvious.
That's right — you type the same thing in both the “Find What” and “Replace With” fields. When Word does the replacement, it will use the current value of the “smart quotes” setting to determine what kind of quote to use.
The same approach works for single quotes. If you do this a lot, you may want a macro. See the LingWord template for a macro that toggles the settings for both quotes and dashes, and makes the corresponding replacements in the document.