I’m so sorry…. that has to be awfully annoying.

Oh, AMEN, sister! When I was in graduate school, I was appalled at how few of my classmates knew how to do any word processing functions beyond basic typing. Hello, page numbering, margins, headers/footers—not hard, people.

They can do the hard stuff—page numbers, footnotes, etc. But the page break thing kills ‘em every time.

Not terribly bad, but I really don’t like seeing the first sentence of a paper on the title page…

Why must you complain so much?

Do you not get paid by Duke University/St. Louis University for your fair evaluation of students’ work?

Rather than cowardly complaining into cyberspace, speak up in class and share your thoughts face to face with those who bother you.

And if it continues to be a problem find a real solution. Do something positive about it. Professors across the country commonly use tablet PCs to review and mark-up submitted student work without ever worrying about a paper trail.

Gee, can’t a prof have a little fun complaining about silly little things on his blog without everyone getting all serious about it? Lighten up…

(For some silly reason, I feel the need to give this complaint a substantive response.)

My “fair evaluation of students’ work” includes (at the margins) such things as formatting and style. If I’m not getting the paper in the form that it was intended by its author, it’s the student’s grade that will suffer, fairly or unfairly, because of bad presentation.

Is it a letter-grade issue? No, at least not consciously. But it might color my perception of how dilligent the student was in writing the paper nonetheless, and when you have 61 papers to grade over the course of a day or two, the subjective things like “why is the text running around the graph funny? I guess Student X didn’t proof their paper” may leave an impression.

The moral of this story: don’t assume my printer will print things the same way yours does. If you’re really paranoid, email me a PDF.

And think of it as preparation for the real world. Emailing a sloppily-formatted paper to a client, your boss, or your thesis/dissertation advisor will come back and bite you in the ass.

wow…called a coward for making a light hearted remark….geez people lighten up a little

Maybe you should teach them to use TeX:-) Generating PDFs with TeX is easy and the output quality is rather good. But the best thing is: You avoid most of the “I treat my computer as a typewriter” problems.

I have always found the auto-formating defaults of Word the biggest problem for most writers. I am amazed that the writers do not know how to deal with hanging paragraphs, auto-outlning, paragraph styles, etc. I am also amazed how many of writers do not even know how to set a TAB.

There is also the problem in that the default in word for cut and paste bring the format with it from the original document.

I like the idea of the PDF instead of the word document.

It seems simple to me… If you want to make a good impression (and, get a good grade), take some time to make sure your work looks good on arrival. This is basic stuff. If your students can’t figure that much out, how good can the content be?

Sorry Chris, this is an incredibly frustrating problem. One way to clean these up quickly is to run a search and replace where you search for double paragraph end marks and replace them with single ones.
“Find: pp”
“Replace with: ^p”

Run the same search and replace a few times and you end up with the paragraphs without the double paragraph spacing. Then, just select all and set the paragraph spacing to whatever you like.

When sending correspondence to counterparties, I always use pdf’s – it’s the only way to control the output.

It is maddening that for packages which include color graphic/photos and renderings, even pdf files will change formatting based upon the printer drivers loaded.

For your students who don’t want to shell out the dough (or rip off Adobe), have them try PDF ReDirect 2.1.7. It’s the best rated free-ware pdf creator.