Sorry if this is a dumb question...I've tried everything to figure it out.

I need to have 1" margins all around on my paper for a really anal professor. I go to page setup and set the margins to 1" but Word does this irritating skip at the end of each page because it's set to double spacing. If I delete to make the skip go away, it won't work. Nothing I do can get rid of the skipping that makes the white space at the bottom of the page about 1.25"+.

My professor takes a ruler and measures for 1" all the way around...because of the skip, she refused to grade my paper last time. I asked her how to make the margins all 1" and she said she doesn't know how to do that in Word.

Help? (Thank you!)

10/16/2006 8:27:26 PM

Your teacher is a fucking nazi and a jew.

If you did 1" margins all around and she also required double spacing, there is a chance the last part of the page would be skipped, making it look like >1" margin, when in fact it is a 1" margin.

10/16/2006 8:29:35 PM

i have a very hard time believing this....

i mean, i have no reason to think you're making it up, but it's really an unbelieveable requirement. What is the class and the prof's name. What about some fo the other people in the class?
Take your paper she refused to grade and go straight to the department head.

10/16/2006 8:31:02 PM

set your top/bottom margin to .9, your last line should fit and tell her why it's .9 instead of 1"

10/16/2006 8:31:14 PM

Tell her that if she doesn't know how to use the damn program that everyone on the planet should know how to use by now, she shouldn't require stupid crap like that.

Seriously though. Word can be really retarded and especially with margining, sometimes it's best to open a whole new file and just start reformatting everything.

10/16/2006 8:31:44 PM

I am aware that she is a heinous bitch, yes.

Salstad in the Spanish department. It is an actual requirement and she did refuse to read my paper (she refused to read a lot of papers). I asked one of the people in the class and she said it was "something that had 'automatic' in it" - she thought it was in page setup. I looked, but nothing.

Hm - I'll try the .9" thing and see if it works. She might still freak out, though.

10/16/2006 8:34:05 PM

Please talk to the department head. NCSU does not need bullshit like this and it doesn't matter about your learning. Tell her she needs to firm up her definition of "margin" and "double spacing" if she can't fucking realize that you set the shit correctly in Word.

Christ, am I really reading this?!

10/16/2006 8:42:25 PM

try Format > Paragraph > Line and Page Breaks > and play with those options to keep paragraphs together and lines together.

10/16/2006 9:02:16 PM

I still say no - don't even spend another minutes futzing with Word. You're doing exactly what you're supposed to do. If you set 1" margins and your line breaks don't happen to fall in the right place, that's not your problem.

Go in to see the department head tomorrow. even better, get a couple other people from the class.

10/16/2006 9:06:42 PM

yeah i'd raise hell about it

but i'd know how to play her way too - i wouldn't bank on the fact that the department would side with me. i'd turn in the paper to her specs and then go to the department. then there's no risk involved on your end.

10/16/2006 9:09:10 PM

Try this:
1) select all your text (ctrl+A)
2) Format > Paragraph > Indents & Spacing Tab > Spacing Section
3) Line-spacing drop-down menu > Select Exactly
4) At (the entry field next to it): 24 pt.
5) Click ok.

Does that help at all?

10/16/2006 9:30:19 PM

^You're a genius!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you thank you thank you!


Although now that I have my margins exactly at 1" on all sides, there's no room to write "suck it, bitch" at the end...

I've been debating going to the department head over it, since it had NOTHING to do with the content of my paper. No one else in the class really seemed to get fired up about it, though. I wish she'd hurry up and retire already.

10/16/2006 9:43:47 PM

Nice, glad it worked out. It does seem kinda unreasonable to demand such typesetting from students. If this was a print media graphic design course, maybe....I'd at least let someone know. Or you can be the hero and let all your classmates know how to avoid this problem from now on. Go that route.

[Edited on October 16, 2006 at 9:48 PM. Reason : .]

10/16/2006 9:47:56 PM

write this down so at the end of the semester you can be especially "inspired" when writing your teacher eval

10/17/2006 12:04:02 AM

there's also the widow/orphan control (under - format :: paragraph :: line and page breaks, uncheck widow/oprhans), which is automatically enabled in word. basically it's used to keep the first couple or last couple lines of a paragraph together so you don't have only one or two stray lines at the end or beginning of a page. enables easier flow in reading each paragraph of a document. however it does what your teacher apparently doesn't want, and makes the bottom margins a bit larger.

if you happen to disable it, i'd suggest enabling it when you're done, it's a good feature to use. did a quick look on microsoft's word help, btw, here's the wid/orp entry:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HP051895451033.aspx

but as the rest have said, it's an absolute BS requirement to measure the bottom margin of a page and completely reject the paper. report it.

[Edited on October 17, 2006 at 1:09 AM. Reason : linked help]

10/17/2006 1:08:57 AM

^^ She should just print out this thread and attach it to the evaluation, lol.

10/17/2006 1:29:29 AM

She wants the 1" margins for using her red pen to make notes. However I would send an email to your department head stating that she did not know how to do it but expected you to alter your word program to do it. She didn't want it in a standard format.

I had a similar professor who was just ridiculous about things like that. She wanted my font size to be 12, font type arial, double spaced or she wouldn't accept it. That wasn't too bad but the inch margins is fucking retarded and completely unnecessary. She's just being a bitch.

10/17/2006 7:31:01 AM

Haha. It sounds like this professor is trying to curb all the middle school techniques for padding out a 3 and a half page paper to make it look like a four pager.

Double spacing = 2.2 spacing.
14-point font
1.25" margins

There must be some sort of length requirement as well.

10/17/2006 7:37:37 AM

Did she let you turn in your first paper again that she didnt read?

10/17/2006 9:27:32 AM

gs7 - Aha, THAT'S the thing the girl in my class was talking about. It definitely was skipping in order to keep the paragraphs together and easier to read. Thank you!

Oh I'll be inspired enough come eval time...this is only the tip of the iceberg.

She told me the skipping (even though I specifically set margins at 1" - it's not like I failed to read her anal requirements) caused my paper to be a few lines short and thus "less than the required 3 pages" which then made it fail to reach TWO of the requirements. The paper she failed to read was the rough draft - we were supposed to turn in our rough drafts for grading (again, bitchy) and then revise and turn in a final draft. Both grades would be averaged. Out of TWO sections (of about 20+ students), she read NINE papers. It was clearly just to get out of grading all those papers.

Quote :

"Your paper should include a cover page in addition to the required 3 full pages, and be typed using a computer, double-spaced, with 12-pt. font and 1" margins on all sides. Papers that do not meet this requirement will not be read. On the cover page type the essay title, your name, class section, and date you hand in the paper. Do not repeat this information on page 1. Number the inside pages except for the first one."

(All bold/intalics is hers) And that's only part of her insanely long "essay rubric" and anal class req's...this class will be the death of me. But since I got a B on the rewrite of my first paper that she refused to read, the department will hopefully listen to my complaint...I'm going.

[Edited on October 17, 2006 at 10:06 AM. Reason : fdsa]

10/17/2006 10:06:23 AM

^^yeah alot of professors will talk a big game before the assignment so that people dont try that stuff, but I have never had a professor actually measure the margins. wow

10/17/2006 10:08:58 AM

I had a nightmare experience with the secretary that screens the master's theses back in grad school over similar stuff. Set the margins and all that, did the APA formatting, and she raised a bitch about margins at the end of a half-dozen pages. I was ready to choke someone after that bullshit, especially when I found out that some of the things she wanted were arbitrary in nature and didn't meet the university publishing requirements.

Take it up with the department head if this shit keeps up.

10/17/2006 10:52:58 AM

i had a teacher in high school pull this exact same thing, ruler and all

he really WAS jewish and constantly told us we were worthless because we couldn't follow directions

man, i hated him...no one needs to know the comma rules THAT badly

10/17/2006 10:58:33 AM

she refused to read a rough draft of a paper because of a margin.

what the fuck is wrong with our education system.

10/17/2006 11:00:24 AM

There are standards for papers at NC State if you really want to fight that battle. They are the defaults of MSWord.

My sophomore year I was forced to rewrite a paper because the teacher claimed I was plagerizing. I was kinda shocked by it seeing how her reasoning for this was that I didn't correctly site my works. We're talking format of the works cited, not that it wasn't there. The paper was 50% of our grade. It got to the point where she said she wouldn't take it unless i rewrote it in the format she provided (even though it went directly against what the fucking $45 blue book of formatting rules you have to buy states).

I rewrote it her way, and it made it go to 11 pages. She did not want any papers over 10 pages and again refused to take it. At this point this is where you want to smash someones face in.

This paper was our final exam so I literally said "Fine lets see what your department head has to say". I walked out down the hall and man she can run fast to catch up to me. I let her know that if I got a grade that I believe the paper didn't deserve I would give a copy to her department head along with a copy of her requirements.

I got an A-.

I thanked god I didn't see her on the next round of english courses.

10/17/2006 11:03:33 AM

Quote :

"... and 1" margins on all sides ..."

chartreuse, if that was a copy paste of her requirements up there ^^^^^^ and she really wants to play that game, you should let her know the SIDES of the paper only define the LEFT or RIGHT margins. when was the last time you looked to the side and suddenly found yourself looking up or down?

10/17/2006 11:28:53 AM

^ that happened to me once after some bad shrooms. totally BLEW my mind...

10/17/2006 11:53:36 AM

^^
paper is a rectangle.
all rectangles have 4 SIDES.

if a 1" margin is required on all sides
THEN IT IS REQUIRED ON ALL FOUR (4) SIDES.

10/17/2006 12:22:52 PM

people who grade papers based on their length should stay in middle school where they belong.

it's like they're punishing students for being concise.

10/17/2006 12:37:51 PM

^

Quote :

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

10/17/2006 1:25:05 PM

You would think that by college, we would all be past the specific page requirements, word lengths and anal retentive formatting requirements.

10/17/2006 1:27:38 PM