Just noticed (and I should have, long ago) something that can certainly affect a reader, and the writer, in this day and age of technology that didn’t come up in the days before e-mail or online submissions.
You know all those red and green squiggles underlining your misspellings or possibly grammatical errors? Well, when you attach a document to an e-mail, whether it be for class work or submission in the hopes of publication, those little lines are what the recipient sees as well.
It is pointing out what it considers to be errors in your work.
Probably the last thing you should do is go over the piece from the top, and consider each suggestion. Take it and make the change, but if you disagree, click the ignore option to eliminate the lines.
Sure wish I’d have thought of this in four years of academic entries and the few submissions I’ve made in the creative pieces I’ve sent out.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
Those are pesky, particularly if you use portmanteau words. Do you know whether or not the “ignore” carries over to the other person’s machine. That is if you ignore it on your computer, does it still ignore it on the other person’s?
I’ll be glad when everyone starts using pdf files for that sort of thing.