Page:How to write a Short Story.djvu/67

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CHAPTER VI

THE PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPT

When you have expended your best energies on your story, and by careful revision have brought it to the highest degree of excellence of which you are capable, it is ready to be dressed up in a fetching manner for the editorial eye. You must now recopy it in such a way that no mark of your workmanship in recasting and reconstructing will show. Fine clothes do not make an acceptance, any more than they make a gentleman, but they command respect in both cases.

First of all, your manuscript should be neatly and correctly typewritten. I don't care how legibly you may write, you can't compare with the printed letters of the machine. Moreover, you are stringing a thousand-word story over great pads of paper, when you might print it on four thin sheets. An editor's