Rejected for having "formatting turned on"?

[JoelRivera]

Hi,

My article "The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation to Reduce Stress" was recently rejected with the following information:

==== Editorial Information for Your Article: ====

Part of this has formatting turned on. This should be turned off for sales purposes. //

==== End Editorial Information for Your Article ====

Do any of you know what this means?

[katemcbride]

Hello there.I will tell you exactly what it means-an editor is messing with you!!I have had one article accepted with single spaces between paragraphs which is supposed to be double,then got no less than THREE articles rejected for unreasonable stuff in "part of the article"???-there were even suggestions in these edits to put 3 and 4 spaces between paragraphs-crazy stuff
I wrote to customer support to ask them for a commitment from the editor in question whoever it is to stop this so that I could consider doing another article and was told nicely to submit no more articles which was fine cos i can't waste any more time on this nonsense.
I am dealing with Celeste the moderator on here now about this because she is also an editor and might be able to sort it out.
Also,I am starting new post for it called "Writers beware" in this forum to see if there are others with this experience so that others can avoid the same pitfalls and avoid wasting their time on this jargon and unreasonable time-wasting.I would fit them better to get on with formatting in the editor's department-after all it is their job not ours.

[Celeste Stewart]

Kate, I'm not an editor nor am I part of COnstant-Content. I do have moderator privileges, but that's because I volunteered to delete spam. As far as editors messing with anyone, I'm sorry, but that's doubtful. It may feel like it, but there's obviously something being lost in translation. While I think that the message "formatting turned on" is vague, perhaps to the point of being meaningless, it's not cause for alarm.

Joel, did the article use styles like different styles for heading text and body text?

[Celeste Stewart]

Joel, here's an idea. Did you click the funny "P" paragraph symbol in your word processor before you saved the document? If you open your document, does your text display the paragraph symbols and dots between words? Maybe that's it?

[katemcbride]

Celeste,

I am really glad to hear that this is likely to be an upload/translation issue and I will review your advice about the settings in Word 2003 on paragraphs that you sent me in "Greetings from Ireland".I already did the "0pt" ones last week(they were fine when I checked them).I found out about that in another post.There is another suggestion in your post about Ctrl A that I need to try.I am lucky to have a good contact in the computer business that I can consult locally about this if I need to but I am wary of changing the default settings as my word processor works well for me.
In this context,I will not submit another public request until I learn more from you and other writers on the forum about freelance writing in general.

Best thing to do is just file the rejections for formatting another time when I have followed your instructions and try again on something new-"Vienna" and Use of Adjectives" are two public requests I am interested in doing anyway

Your prompt replies and useful advice here in the forum are much appreciated.Thank you.

Kate

[katemcbride]

So,Ctrl A and the funny P symbol as per your advice to Joel above are two things to try to sort this out Celeste.Cheers for that!

[JoelRivera]

Kate and Celeste, thank you for your replies. I will definitely review my article based on your suggestions and resubmit it. Another option that i considered was to simply paste the text into a txt file (notepad) and then uploading in this format, as this does not support formatting. Do you have any experiences with this?

[JoelRivera]

Just wanted to update you on this issue. I tried to press the "funny P" button in the word processor and discovered that one of my paragraphs contained "invisible" characters in a company name which i copy-pasted from a web site. I found two solutions which both worked:

1. After pressing "funny P", i could easily remove the characters and press "funny P" again to return to normal mode.
2. I could copy all text to notepad. Then in notepad, select all text again and copy it to a new word document.

Thanks a lot for your input!

[Celeste Stewart]

Glad the mystery is solved.