Create Professional-Looking Documents

Thanks to the availability of computers and versatile word processing programs, it is possible for almost anyone to publish high-quality print documents. The tips below will help you become aware of some of the secrets professional typesetters use "to make type pleasing, beautiful, readable, legible, and artistic – secrets we just weren't taught in Typing 1A." (Williams, Robin. The Non-Designer's Type Book: Insights and Techniques for Creating Professional-Level Type, Peachpit Press, 1998.)

• Use only one space after periods, colons, exclamation points or any other punctuation mark. Computers use proportional rather than monospace type. Therefore, extra spaces are not needed to separate sentences.
• Italicize titles of books, periodicals, plays, works of art, etc. Underlining is for typewriters and longhand.
• Use italics or boldface for emphasis rather than underlining.
• Very rarely use all capital letters. All caps tend to be much harder to read. Because we have different type styles, we no longer need to rely on all caps to make something noticeable.
• Do not use the space bar to align text. Use tabs and first-line indents instead.
• Avoid combining more than two font styles on the same page.
• The traditional, standard format for a.m. and p.m. is small caps.
• Be consistent when formatting headings and subheadings in a document. For example, if you left-align one heading, left align them all.
• If a word requires an accent mark, use it. In MS Word, InsertàSymbol…
• Either indent the first line of paragraphs or add extra space between them – not both.
• Avoid leaving widows and orphans on the page. A widow occurs when a paragraph ends with fewer than seven characters on its last line. An orphan is the last line of a paragraph that is left by itself at the top of the next page or column.

Do It Yourself Design Tips from the University of Minnesota