I've been going to a new (to me, anyway) face-to-face writers' critique group for awhile now. I won't go into a lot of detail about it, like I did with the Garden Variety Writers (hey, you wouldn't believe me anyway, right?) but I'm a writer and I ought to write more about writing in this blog, so maybe I'll throw out a few observations from time to time, without mentioning any names.

One of the first things I noticed about the work to be critiqued was that it was seldom in the usually accepted manuscript format. I thought manuscript mechanics were one of the first things a person learned when starting out as a writer. There's usually some variation of the basic manuscript format described in most how-to books on writing.

Yet, most of the manuscripts from this group are printed in the Times Roman font. That's not a drop-dead killer with most editors, but I definitely know some editors who don't want to read anything but Courier. I don't think any of the work I've seen so far has used the convention of underlining to indicate italics. Other stuff like that.

So what should I do? I don't want to rub people's noses in such picky nonsense as underlining words when they mean italics, but I'd feel remiss if I see something wrong and just assume they know the conventions and don't mention it. So, I point out that Courier, while ugly, is probably what they ought to set their work in, and I underline the words in their manuscripts that should be underlined, and point out other mechanical details, in addition to critiquing the actual story.

I suppose I'm coming off like some sort of nit-picker, but if they haven't learned this stuff already from books, shouldn't someone doing a critique point it out?