Changing fonts and sizes of lettering in your manuscript can make navigating it easier for readers. Chapter and section heads, for example, often are boldface and use larger lettering than the main text, as this indicates shifts in topics. The size and typeface of any text is called a style, and several of them likely are used in a manuscript, such as one for the main text, another for the chapter title, and yet another for the subheads.
The challenge to writers when formatting their manuscript is consistency in the use of their styles. If a chapter section’s heading is font size 16, even just a subtle shift to font size 15 in the next section heading can look strange to readers and lead them to wonder if they’re about to read a subsection rather than a new section. That can result in confusion about about how ideas in your manuscript are related.
Simply put, consistency in the use of styles leads to a reader-friendly experience and a professional appearance.
Remembering the specifics of each item (such as if a chapter title is font size 14 or if a subhead font size 12 in italics) can be difficult. Fortunately, you can automate them in MS Word by using the styles function. A style in MS Word is a set of formatting instructions so that whenever you want text to be a subhead, selecting that pre-set style will give you a same point size, font style, and alignment, ensuring consistency.
MS Word comes with several built-in styles, typically shown on the right side of Home ribbon. You also can create your own styles, which I recommend if you’re formatting an ebook. The built-in styles often do not lend to a professional appearance as they are forced to fit your manuscript’s needs.
When creating a style, before even setting them up on MS Word write a list of how each one should look. When making this list, you want to write styles for at least the following items:
• Chapter title
• Section headers within a chapter
• Subheads within sections
• Main (or body) text
• Captions
To this list you might add drop caps, sidebar headers, sidebar text, sidebar source, footnotes, left page folio, and right page folio.
Next, for each of those items, you want to determine the following:
• Font
• Font size
• Bold, italics or regular type
• Align left, centered, align right or justified
Keep the formula simple. For example, every style ought to be single spaced with 1.15 line spacing and no automated added spaces before or after the text. With the exception of the captions, all the items should be in the same font.
So your styles might be:
• Chapter title
> Cambria
> Font size 30
> Bold
> Centered
• Section headers within a chapter
> Cambria
> Font size 15
> Bold
> Align left
• Subheads within sections
> Cambria
> Font size 11.5
> Italics
> Align left
• Main text
> Cambria
> Font size 11.5
> Regular type
> Justified
• Captions
> Calibri
> Font size 11.5
> Regular type
> Justified
Once you’ve got a list of your styles, on the Home ribbon tap the arrow in the lower right hand side of the Styles section. A drop-down menu will appear. Click the square icon in the menu’s lower left corner. A pop-up screen will appear that allows you to enter all the elements of the style you wish to create. Do so using your notes. When done, click OK in the pop-up screen’s lower right corner.
The style you’ve just created will appear at the left side of the Styles section on the Home ribbon. Whenever you want to use that style, simply highlight the words you wish to change and click that style in the Home ribbon. The highlighted text will change to the styles you’ve set.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.