Formatting your manuscript

Over the last few weeks, in both my freelance and acquisitions editor capacities, I’ve been working on a lot of manuscripts – reading, editing, converting, and typesetting – and I’ve had to spend a fair amount of time taking out formatting which is either actively irritating or simply doesn’t need to be there.

I don’t mind this too much, because mostly it takes about five minutes to fix, but those five minutes add up over a lot of manuscripts, particularly for someone reading a hundred 3-chapt...