After reading through tons of working and conference papers lately, I have become slightly obsessed with the typographic insanities that are still widespread in social science where few people use proper tools for publication. These are the most annoying ones at the moment:

1. Double-spaced text. If you want your paper to be read, use line spacing that does not punish the interested reader. No, most conference papers, a lot of journals and even books are not typeset by a professional who could potentially use the huge space for annotations. Your paper is probably read like it is now, and anything above 1.4 spacing sucks most of the time.

2. Narrow margins, mostly combined with (1). If I was to scribble comments on your paper, I’d certainly use the right (or outer) margin for this. No margin, no comments.

3. Sans-serif fonts or Times. Unless you have found an exceptionally readable sans-serif, stay with serif fonts. Palatino, Minion Pro and others are freely (as in beer) available for LaTeX and word processors. Times is for two column layouts, which you should use only if you need to save paper!

4. “Figure 4 about here.” Am I supposed to cut and paste your tables and figures or constantly skip to the end of your paper? Unless you are preparing a manuscript directly for type-setting (and most of the time you don’t, see above), please leave your floats where they belong.

5. Endnotes. Footnotes are bad for references, but endnotes are just plain insulting. Don’t ever use them.

“But most journals only accept manuscripts like that!” Even if you often cannot discuss the usefulness of those requirements with the editors, most pre-publication articles (those that are circulated) can be made readable with a few clicks even in Word. It’s not that hard to have separate versions.