5 things to stop typing

Over the years, I’ve taken thousands of documents people have typed up, usually using the ubiquitous Microsoft Word, and then spent countless hours fixing them. I’m not just talking about spelling and grammar mistakes (we all make them…), but typing errors—most of them holdovers from the days of typewriters.

If a document is for use within a company or organisation, those mistakes don’t matter much, but if the document will be used in something that’ll be professionally laid-out and printed—like newsletters, annual reports or brochures—then it does matter. Anything that takes extra time will probably cost more money, so it’s a good idea to avoid mistakes in typing.

Here are five common mistakes people make when typing a document:

1. HEADLINES SHOULD NEVER BE IN ALL CAPS! Did you find that easy to read? That’s why newspapers and magazines don’t print headlines in all caps. That’s a holdover from typewriter days when there was one type size and weight. Instead, just make your headline bold and/or make it bigger.
2. A tab is not something you pull. When indenting a line, use a tab, never spaces. Spaces get all messed up when the document is reformatted for publishing. There’s special formatting you can use, like hanging indents for lists, or maybe first line indents for paragraphs, but they’re not really necessary for a document that will be published professionally. But if you insist on indenting text, use a tab and never spaces.
3. Deceptive appearances. Many people like to type with justified text, that is, where the left and right margins are all straight lines, like in a column of text in newspaper. If you use that, you won’t see any extra spaces you’ve accidentally put in. Also, these documents sometimes turn out really weird when placed in professional publishing software. Instead, let the right margin do as it pleases! Word calls this “Align Text Left,” other programs call it “Left Justified” (and typographers often call it “ragged right”). Whatever you call it, that’s what this blog post is. Also, keep in mind that if the recipient of your document doesn’t have the same fonts, it could look—and the layout could be—very different from what you see, so stick to basic, boring typefaces.
4. Return to sender. Using the return (or enter) key is like slamming your hand down on your desk: It’s abrupt, it’s noisy and very jarring. That’s why it’s used ONLY at the end of a paragraph and NEVER at the end of a line, like folks used to do on typewriters. Computers automatically wrap the text onto the next line, so if you hit return at the end of each line, professional publishing software will see every line as a separate paragraph. That has to be fixed line-by-line, meaning hours of endless non-fun.
5. One space only. The biggest, most common mistake people make when typing: NEVER put two spaces after a full stop (called a “period” the US and other places). This is another throwback to typewriters. In those days, every character got the same amount of space (this is called “monospacing” or “fixed width”). Adding an extra space after sentences made paragraphs easier to read. But when word processors came along, they introduced proportional spacing, that is, they give space to characters based on how big they are; for example, an uppercase “W” takes up more room than a lowercase “i”, or a fullstop, and the spacing is adjusted. They also automatically add extra space at the end of each sentence. So, when you put in two spaces, it’s actually the equivalent of adding many spaces. Professional publishing software often sees these as BIG spaces. So, publishers have to strip out extra spaces between sentences.

Keep in mind that a real-live person will have to spend real-live person time fixing all these typing errors, on top of routine editing, before they can turn your document into your lovely professionally printed and published masterpiece. That extra time could cost you more money, so it really is to your advantage to—ahem!—type right.

This post was inspired, in part, by a Tweet from my fellow American expat in New Zealand, @juliryan.