Copying and pasting essay into AMCAS

[up40loves]

Should I use Notepad or Wordpad? Does it matter?

Thanks!

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[vbdoc77]

I used Microsoft Word and didn't have any problems. Heard this may not always be the case though.

 

[up40loves]

I wrote my essay in Word and then copied and pasted into Wordpad. Then copied it from Wordpad into the textbook and the formatting is really screwed up. No indentations etc. Can anyone help me out? Or tell me what they did?

Thanks!

 

[silverhorse84]

It happens to everyone. Just put a blank line in between your paragraphs so they can tell where one stops and the other starts.

 

[up40loves]

It annoys me that I am not able to indent! Was anyone here able to and if so, what did you do?

Thanks!

 

[up40loves]

Bump

 

[silverhorse84]

I don't think you're going to get a response about indenting - I've never heard anyone say they've figured out how to do it.

 

[LikeClockWork]

I don't think you're going to get a response about indenting - I've never heard anyone say they've figured out how to do it.

I didn't indent since it just wastes characters (I think a tab counts as 5). Just put your essay in block paragraph format since I think many, many other people do the same.

 

[padres0629]

Should I use Notepad or Wordpad? Does it matter?

Thanks!

It DOES matter. When you write your essay in Word, you should copy your essay into NOTEPAD or any plain text editor. Wordpad is a rich text editor, so it's like you're copying a rich-text file into a rich-text file editor.

Notepad is a plain-text editor, which is what the AMCAS essay space is. Copying your essay into Notepad will show you all the little Word nuisances (em dashes, curly quotes, etc.) that might not translate when you copy your essay into the AMCAS app. You can also use Smultron, gVim, PFE, or any plain-text editor on the web.

 

[padres0629]

BUMP please, I am ready to submit but I'm not able to due to the formatting of my essay

Notepad... Notepad... Notepad (or any plain-text editor)

 

[mbe36]

Proper format should NOT have indentation.

 

[student1799]

I wrote my essay in Word and then copied and pasted into Wordpad. Then copied it from Wordpad into the textbook and the formatting is really screwed up. No indentations etc. Can anyone help me out? Or tell me what they did?

While reading another thread here recently, I learned a neat trick that allows you to do the essay IN WORD with no problems. It's simple: just go to Tools/Auto-Correct Options, then find the tab that says "AutoFormat as you Type." On this tab, you'll see a number of checked boxes (like "replace straight quotes with smart quotes")--uncheck ALL of them. Once you do this, you should be able to copy anything straight from Word with no formatting problems. (I know, because I did this with my work/activities entries, and then looked at them on the pdf. Everything was fine.)

Thanks to the clever SDNer who figured this out first!

 

[Dulcina]

i used word, but all my apostraphe's turned into an upsidedown question mark. i jus twent through manually to correct them

 

[padres0629]

i used word, but all my apostraphe's turned into an upsidedown question mark. i jus twent through manually to correct them

Part of Word's formatting is to use curly quotes. Plain text editors don't understand this character. A few posts up, student1799 describes a method in Word to sidestep this. In my opinion, I'd still copy your stuff into a plain-text editor.

I used to work closely with an Engineering documentation team at my old job, and they tend to be weary of using Word because of the many behind-the-scenes operations it does and corruptibility issues. As a matter of convention, they'd always copy text into a plain-text editor for quality control. That team does documentation professionally, so I tend to believe that their practices are more sound, which is why I'd say to the OP, you should still copy to the plain-text editor.