6 tricks to squeeze your correspondence onto one page - journalism

Anyone who has read any of my articles on the area under discussion of letter characters or resume characters will know how central I consider it is to curtail the digit of pages, first limiting them to one page every time possible.

And, we all know how tacky it looks when we put the finishing touches on a dispatch and it overflows onto the second page by one or two lines. Very unprofessional!

So, there are a amount of handy hardly tricks that I've used over the years that can help "squeeze" a correspondence or other authenticate onto one page devoid of it being noticed by the be around reader. These tricks can be useful using any standard word doling out software program.

I'm not sure whether a classicist at a clerical drill would approve of some of my methods since they may differ from certain mechanical standards, but I have used them hundreds of times and insignificant person has ever been the wiser. The main point being that I was able to keep a dispatch on one page when the first edition overflowed by a few lines onto a back page.

Below are my "page compression tips", planned in the order in which I advocate you apply them:

1. Change Side Margins First

Move both the left and right margins out about 1/4 in. faster to the edge of the page.

2. Top and Bed Margins Next

Move the top and foot margins out about 1/4 in. nearer to the edge of the page.

3. Eliminate The Overflows

Edit out the one or two word "overflows". What I mean here is this: After the correspondence is drafted take a good look at each paragraph. See if there are any that have an end condemnation that "overflows" onto an extra line for the sake of one word. If so, make a minor edit or two in the clause that shortens it a barely so that the last word or two will not overflow onto the subsequent line. Using this method, you can often gain two or three extra lines in a one-page letter.

4. Play With Your Spacing

Adjust the line spacing on the page. You can gain huge space on a page by adjusting the line spacing of the text. For example, if the defaulting line spacing is set to "single" at 12 points try backdrop it to "exactly" at 12 points if your font size is 12. If that doesn't do it, try "exactly" at "11 pts". Often you have to carry out trial a bit with this one to get the look just right.

5. Bring down The Font Size

As a last resort, try plummeting the size of the font by 1 point size, say from 12 to 11 points.

6. Edit One More Time

If it still doesn't "fit", there's one final thing you can try if you're the dramatist of the letter. Go back and edit it one more time. Look for disused belief and phrases, or those that can be mutual into one decree fairly than two. Is every word and axiom categorically basic to your message? You'll be amazed at the space savings that this course can consequence in.

As I affirmed earlier, try the above methods in sequence, one-at-a-time, examination each time to see if your latest change has done the trick for you.

What happens if it still won't fit?

Now, if you've used all of the above tricks and you still can't get the correspondence to fit onto one page, it's time to admit that you've got a real two-pager. In which case, you must then think about "reversing" some of the compression tricks that you useful when you tried to "squeeze" the letter, and then concentrate on building a balanced looking agree with page.

There's naught worse looking than a dispatch with a one or two condemnation back up page! So in this case, you may want to in point of fact "stretch" the dispatch out a bit.

Often, at this stage I essentially become more intense the line spacing and bring down the margins a little so that there will be a decent sized overflow onto the back up page.

For example, try reversing steps 1, 2 and 4 above. So instead of decreasing the top, floor and side margins on page one, try greater than ever them by 1/4 in. all around. Then augment the point size and see if that helps. Ideally, try to get the page to break cleanly at a paragraph break, for a nice tidy page-to-page transition.

Again, I have used these barely "compression" tricks thousands of times, and minion has ever pulled out their ruler and chastised me for inaccuracy.

The chief thing is to end up with a professional "looking" letter.

In fact, if you do a very full check of the real-life templates built-in in any one of my Inscription Toolkits you would find that I have used one or more of the above tricks on many of them. But, I'm not effective which ones!

Click the link below my name to see a full list of all of those Copy Kits.

© 2005 by Shaun Fawcett

Shaun Fawcett, is webmaster of the admired inscription help site WritingHelp-Central. com. He is also the dramatist of several best promotion "writing toolkit" eBooks. All of his eBooks and his globally celebrated f-r-e-e course, "Tips and Tricks For Copy Success" are free at his characters tools site: http://www. writinghelptools. com