Lesson catalog

Craft on the Page

Formatting as competence

30 min

Fixes this hazard: The pages look amateur before a single line has been judged.

Repairs: Professional Readiness · Visual Storytelling · Scene Effectiveness

Formatting will never make a bad script good, but bad formatting reliably makes a good script look unfinished. A reader assesses your competence in the first fifteen seconds, from the shape of the page, and everything after that is read through the impression they already formed.

The list of things that matter is short and non-negotiable: a clean title page with your name and one contact, consistent sluglines, character names introduced once in caps with an age and a defining detail, no camera direction unless the story truly needs it, no bold or coloured text, and standard margins from real screenwriting software.

The list of things that do not matter is longer than writers fear: which software you used, whether you use CONTINUOUS or DAY, occasional 'we see' if it is rare and purposeful, and page count within a sane range for the genre.

Run formatting as its own pass, never mixed with rewriting. Fixing craft and cosmetics at the same time means you do neither properly, and you will miss the inconsistency that appears once on page 74.

HOW TO RUN IT

The checklist pass

  • Title page: title, 'written by', your name, one email. Nothing else.
  • Sluglines consistent in form and capitalisation throughout.
  • Every speaking character introduced once, in caps, with one defining detail.
  • No camera directions, no bold, no underlining, no colour.
  • Page count sane for the genre; no orphaned dialogue across page breaks.

Final polish

  • Spellcheck character names specifically — software skips them.
  • Export to PDF and read it in the PDF, not in the editor.
  • Check the first and last page hardest; they are read most closely.

BEFORE AND AFTER

Before

INT. Johns apartment - night (CONTINOUS)
We PUSH IN on JOHN, who is sad.

After

INT. JOHN'S APARTMENT — NIGHT

John sits with his coat still on. The takeaway is untouched.

Same information, no typos, no camera direction, and the emotion is shown rather than asserted.

The exercises

DO THE WORK HERE

Write your answers with the script open. Everything is saved on this device as you type — nothing is uploaded, and nothing is scored. The point is that the next draft is different from this one.

0/2

Exercise 1

0 words · 8 min

Which checklist items failed on your current draft?

Be honest; this is the cheapest score you will ever recover.

Exercise 2

0 words · 8 min

Confirm the fixes you made and the page numbers you checked twice.

First page and last page always get the second look.

Saves as you type

The drill

Run one full formatting pass with the Template Vault standards open beside you, then export to PDF and read the first and last pages again in the PDF.