How do you *say* this?

[sholio]

You know, I just posted the formatting guidelines for sga-genficathon and I've realized that I can't come up with a good way of saying "leave an extra carriage return between paragraphs". For one thing, no one calls it a carriage return anymore ...

- Double space between paragraphs?
- Leave a blank line between paragraphs?
- Leave an extra return between paragraphs?
- Separate paragraphs with a blank line?

Which of the above makes more sense to you? Or do you have a better way of saying it? You know what I'm talking about, right ... standard Internet text format, separating paragraphs with a blank line rather than indenting them. I don't want people thinking they have to do something special when I'm just asking them to do what they probably always do when they post a story ...

ETA: Thank you very much to everyone who's weighed in on this! It helps a lot. :)

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

Then it might make sense to actually ask for a text only file, no extraneous formatting, or something.

Word creates tons of gooblygook!

What you need is a simple text file with bold and italics hard coded, right? And the blank line between paragraphs :)

I write everything in my little online text window myself...

[sholio]

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm asking for -- plain text, no smart quotes, bold and italic hard-coded.

I'm just not sure if people are going to see that and run screaming for the hills. On the other hand, I was pretty flexible about formatting last year, and the result was that I spent a lot of time reformatting files and stripping out weird Word symbols and just generally wanting to tear my hair out. After seeing the SGA Big Bang guidelines last year, I feel a lot more confidence about asking people for a specific and clearly defined format.

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

I personally prefer clear guidelines. And it's not like we can't do that formatting!

But then I'm always on the simple is better front :)