[Ann Drysdale]

Can anyone help?

It is, in almost every editor's opinion, a sin to submit poetry with the lines double-spaced. I don't like the look of it myself. I never do it. But lately I've been sending things to on-line journals and have stumbled upon ( ) a problem.

If I send the proposed contribution as an attachment, there is no difficulty, nor with on-line submission forms. However, some editors insist that the poem be submitted in the body of an email and so far I have not found a way to paste poetry text in without its appearing double-spaced.

It isn't - if I delete one of the "double" spaces, the line jumps up alongside the one before. They are single spaces, but somehow oversized.

Is there a way to send a poem in the body of an email without these huge gaps, other than by typing it from scratch?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Orwn Acra]

Check by sending the email to yourself, but I'm pretty sure the illusion of the double spacing goes away when the email is sent. I use Gmail and that's what happens for me.

[David Landrum]

Ann--if you're using Word, check your line spacing tab (under Paragraphs, the icon with an arrow up and down). Not only chose the 1.0 number at the top but click on "Line Spacing Options." When the menu comes up, go to Spacing. You'll see Before: and After: it should say "0 Point" in each other these boxes. If it does not have "0 Point," use the drop-down menu to change it to that. This may be the source of your problem.

dwl

[Kathleen Fitzpatrick]

Hi Ann,

I have two suggestions.

If you have formatting problems when transferring text from one format to another, dropping the text into a .txt file often solves the problem. In Windows, use Notepad. Unfortunately, it removes some things you may wish to retain, like italics, curly quotation marks, bold and something with tabs.

You may find some email providers are better at formatting than others. Gmail has two formats, one loaded with options, another, called "Plain Text," without - similar to .txt files, I suppose. You can easily switch between the two. I have a gmail account dedicated to submissions. My husband gets a lot of mileage out of teasing me that it is for correspondence with my boyfriend.

Best,

Kate

[W.F. Lantry]

Ann,

You've gotten many good suggestions. I use the notepad trick all the time. Works wonders.

There is, though, another trick. Take this snippet:

"...And all that mem'ry loves the most

Was once our only hope to be:

And all that hope adored and lost

Hath melted into memory..."

Doublespaced! Arrrgh! So I put my cursor at the end of the first line, and I hit delete (once or twice, depending). Doing that gives me

And all that mem'ry loves the mostWas once our only hope to be:

My cursor is sitting there after the t in 'most.' I hold down the shift key, and hit enter once. This gives me

And all that mem'ry loves the most
Was once our only hope to be:

Suddenly, Bob's my uncle. Works well for short things. Anything much longer, Notepad's your new best friend...

Thanks,

Bill

[Michael Cantor]

If you're in Outlook Express (it may work in Outlook also, but I'm not sure) and what you paste in looks squirrely, highlight the poem you want to change and click on Format, and then on Style, and then on Normal. If Normal doesn't work, play with some of the other options - Formatted sometimes works to snap it all into single spacing for me (problems seem to depend on the source from which you paste), and often at a smaller size - but the size can be easily corrected.

I'm afraid I can't give you logic or a formula - I just poke and curse - but it hasn't happened for a while - when I paste into e-mail now it remains single-spaced - and I susoect it might be because I finally upgraded from Word 95 all the way up to Word 2002 or thereabouts. If you're pasting from your Word documents, and you're on a seriously outmoded version of Word, that might be your problem.

[R. Nemo Hill]

I think if in your originals you always use SHIFT/ENTER to go to a new line (as opposed to just ENTER), the poem will paste single-spaced into gmail. You can experiment with a couple of lines and see if it works.

Nemo

[John Whitworth]

How odd, Ann. It doesn't do that to me. What I do is find the poem, then go to Edit. Then Select All. Then Copy. Then go back to the email and Paste in the space. Works every time. My Word is Word 97 so it's quite old. I can't do hard stuff like italics that way.

[Roger Slater]

The answer must surely be among those you have received, but I offer you yet another possibility. You might try using a different browser. Perhaps Chrome would work, since it is a Google product. Or Firefox. Or IE. I don't know which one you are using, but if you've only tried one, see if you have better luck with another.

Another thing you might look at on Gmail: Among the formatting icons, there is a T with a little red x. This allows you to remove the formatting from any selected text. You might play with that. It's more selective than simply switching over to non-rich text, which would make you lose all formatting throughout the poem instead of just where you want to lose it.

As an tangentially related aside, in the world of children's poetry, editors tend to want poems submitted double spaced. It looks awful, especially between stanzas, and forces lots of poems onto two sheets instead of one. Sadly, this is probably a reflection of the fact that many or most of these editors don't really know or like poetry. There are few if any dedicated "poetry editors" in the world of children's literature as there are in the world of adult poetry.

[Ann Drysdale]

Thank you so much, everybody!

I tried Orwn's idea first, just to make sure I really did have a problem. I did.

Then I looked at the others - and was bit daunted by the more technical suggestions. (Oh, Kathleen - what's a .txt file?) I think "Notepad" is the form in which some people send attachments to me, which my system won't open, saying I don't have a programme associated with such a file.

But Bill's simple trick of using the shift key (and, by extension, Nemo's suggestion of doing it in the original document) seems to work wondrous well. I have shrunk a sonnet to sensible proportions in the body of an email and forwarded it to myself - perfick!

However, Michael has probably hit on the nub of the problem. My gear is on the verge of obsolescence. (Roger, I tried to download Chrome and got a message to say I couldn't do that.)

There's an old Yorkshire definition of thrift. It's not how long you can make summat last till it's buggered - it's how long you can go on using it after it's buggered. I am, through force of circumstance, a very thrifty woman.

Thank you, everyone. You've solved my problem.