This Howto is dedicated to all students who are writing assignments and will show how to layout a paper so it looks less professional than it is.
I discovered the following “Stilblühten” when helping others with layouting their Papers.
- Font: Use of “Sans” Fonts – makes everything harder to read. Students tend to use “comic sans” teachers tend to use “Arial” – Better use a “Serif” font.
- Use of “Italic, Bold and underlined” – everything at the same time! Better: use with care. Stick to standards (Headlines bold, Quotes Italic) Personal Taste: avoid underlined text.
- Centering the text – It makes your text look like a poem. Better: align left Best: Use “justification”
- Use “Space” and “Enter” to layout. Problem: A single change messes up the whole layout. Better: “Tab”, Pageskip and use alignment -> center
- Centering all section headlines. Just don’t do it. Align them left.
- Use of Emoticons (Smilies), only for chat SMS and Email (if you can not avoid it).
- Creating double spaced paragraphs by hitting the “Enter key”
- Underline text by setting a link in Word/OOWriter
Even if you spent two hours figuring out functions of a program you will safe a lot of work later compared to the use of a dirty “workaround”.
Hint: Let your computer worry about the layout! Use LaTeX!