A commonly followed convention, though, is to use a serif font for body text of your document and a sans-serif font for headings. My recommended fonts for general work are Georgia (a very lovely serif font) and Verdana, a very legible sans-serif. Verdana is probably already installed on your computer.

Both of these fonts (together with a number of others) are freely available from Microsoft's Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com ypography/fontpack/default.htm

Fixed-width and variable-width fonts ------------------------------------ In some fonts, every character is same width; in others, characters are of different widths. Not surprisingly, these fonts are termed fixed width and variable width respectively.

Start up you word processor. Type half a dozen lower-case "l"s and then on next line type half a dozen lower-case "w"s. In most fonts "w"s will be much wider. (Such fonts are variable width.)

Now select two lines of characters and set font to Courier or Courier New. Notice that both lines are now same length. Courier is a fixed-width font.

It should be no surprise that variable-width fonts look more natural and are thus easier to read. Fixed-width fonts such as Courier have quite limited application:

* Computer programmers use fixed-width fonts in order to neatly align their code.

* The other main use of fixed-width fonts is to produce tables that need to be neatly tabulated into fixed-width columns.

Conclusion ---------- As an exercise go through fonts on your computer and find five variable-width, serif fonts that you like look of. Choose among these for body copy of your documents.

Now find five variable-width, sans-serif fonts. Use these for your headings, captions, headers and footers.

Armed with these simple ways of classifying fonts, you should now have an easy time of choosing suitable fonts for all occasions.

Niles: But Miss Fine's age is only ... Fran: Young! Miss Fine's age is only young!

4. Excessive punctuation: Only one exclamation mark or question mark should be used at a time. Consider following over-punctuated examples:

Buy now!!! Great bargains!!!!!!!!!!

Excessive punctuation looks too much like hysteria and detracts from your credibility. Avoid it.

5. Headings: For long works, establish a clear hierarchy of headings. Microsoft Word's heading styles are great for this. (They also allow you to automatically create a table of contents.)

6. Hyphenating prefixes: Most prefixes don't need a hyphen; i.e. we write "coexist", not "co-exist". There are exceptions, though. The prefixes "self-" and "ex-" are almost always hyphenated.

7. Numbers: Numbers of ten or less are normally written as words.

8. Quotation marks: Users of American English should use double quotes (" "). Users of British English should choose either single quotes (' ') or double quotes and stick with them for whole document. Incidentally, British English usage is increasingly moving towards single quotes.

9. Spaces: Modern style is to use a single space at end of a sentence, not two. Also, most punctuation marks (e.g. commas, full stops, question marks) are not preceded by a space.

10.Tables: Set table text one or two points smaller than main body text and in a sans-serif font such as Arial or Verdana. Avoid vertical lines as they tend to add unnecessary clutter.

Armed with these simple guidelines, your writing should be well received every time. Good luck!