The Case for Submitting Your Work as a Nicely Formatted PDF
When I was a creative writing graduate student, the process for submitting manuscripts generally went as follows: the writer, a set number of days before her workshop, would print and staple enough copies of her story or poems for all of her classmates, and then would shove the resulting pile of pages into the professor’s English Department mailbox. Students would then stop by and pick up copies at their leisure.
It wasn’t a great system. Writers were often late with their submissions, necessitating return trips to the department office for classmates. Manuscripts could be swiped and read by anyone outside the class, sometimes resulting in embarrassment if the work was subpar or personally revealing. And the psychological burden of dropping all that money on all that printing, all at once, could be rather heavy.
Today, the conventional wisdom seems to be that students should submit their manuscripts via email, and make their classmates do the printing. We all still do as much printing as we used to (excepting those students who prefer to edit digitally, using track changes or tablet annotation apps), but it’s more regular and less painful. This method does, however, solve the other problems.
We’ve lost something, though: the particular look of particular writers’ work. One could tell, in the old days, who wrote what at merely a glance. So-and-so favored narrow margins and monospaced fonts. Such-and-such laid his stories out like book pages, with wide margins, Garamond variants, and page headings. When we read these manuscripts, we read them the way their writers intended. The emailing of word processor files, however, has left manuscripts open to changes—substituted fonts, altered formatting. And certain shortcomings that were once made manifest by printing now go unnoticed by writers, and only appear when classmates print.
I’d like to make a case, then, for student writers—and, ultimately, submitters to magazines—to embrace the .pdf. Rendering manuscripts to .pdf offers readers a consistent experience of the work, with fonts embedded. The .pdf was once a nightmare to load, display, and print; this is no longer the case. It’s no more challenging to manipulate than a .doc or .docx, and it’s very hard to screw one up, without specialized software. Editors, of course, will eventually need some kind of text file in order to publish accepted work, but this is easily provided after the fact.
Rendering to .pdf also means that the writer may devise, develop, and present a personal aesthetic that she believes honors the work, and may be confident that that aesthetic will be conveyed to readers. From here on in, I’m going to make its development a requirement for all students. This requirement will be buttressed by a mandatory reading of Butterick’s Practical Typography, an excellent free primer on typograhy that makes a strong case for everyday thoughtfulness in page layout and design, on the page and on the screen:
For a long time—the typewriter era and then the early computer era—professional publishers could afford typesetting and printing devices that were substantially better than what individuals could afford. So for most writers, the typographic standards of professional publishers were far out of reach.
But that’s no longer the case. On the printed page, the typesetting technology available to individuals comes nearly up to the standards of professional typesetting. On the screen, there’s no difference. Technological excuses are no longer acceptable.
Therefore, professional writers should aspire to meet the standards of professional typography.
(For what it’s worth, I am a devotee of Butterick’s beautiful typewriter font, Triplicate, which evokes the 1950’s and 1960’s typewriters I used to use and adore, and which is now my somewhat eccentric choice for submissions to literary magazines.)
This policy, of course, will mean that each student must choose his own preferred typeface, margins, page-numbering scheme, header and footer layout, and line spacing. I might actually devote an entire class period to this subject. The first day, perhaps.
Because I don’t think we are just trying to create good content, here. We’re trying to create objects, digital or analog, that are a pleasure to read—or at least are stylistically representative of their creator’s intentions. The rise of the ebook has been a blow to book designers, whose careful choices are typically squashed into oblivion by end-use devices over which they have no control. But universally decent ebook design isn’t impossible, and we’ll achieve it more quickly and effectively if we bring up a generation of writers who care about how their work looks on the page.
For now, everybody out there should, at the very least, pick a good font. Save up and buy one, from an independent type designer, the same way you might a nice pen. Peruse Typographica and open up a MyFonts account. Set a favorite paragraph in a variety of fonts that nobody else you know has on their computer. Make your manuscripts look as though you give a crap about what they contain.
