Research Tip Tuesday

Another great research tip from Ann Finkelstein today! You can check out her lovely blog here. Ann acquired these smarts from her local SCBWI-MI listserv where they had a discussion about formatting issues. Carrie Clickard supplied the most helpful of the tips, so we're plugging her as well (thanks Carrie!).

"Electronic queries with weird formatting aren't the best way to make a good impression on a prospective agent. This happens when text formatting commands aren't recognized by the recipient's email program. If you write query letters in a word processing program and paste them into email, or add formatting (like italics) to an email, it may look fine on your screen but terrible on the agent's.

Solutions that may help are:

1) typing the query directly in your email (don't cut and paste)

2) writing the query in Windows "notepad" instead of a word processing program

3) avoiding unusual fonts, bold letters, underlining and italics

4) avoiding non-English symbols or accents if possible

5) using plain text format.

6) setting email preferences so they do not allow HTML tags

You can test drive your electronic query by sending it to a friend who uses a different email provider."

Thanks so much, Ann! I always paste into Notepad first if I'm stressing about formatting. And peeps, if you'd like to send in a tip (please do!), see this post.