Here's what you do to really really stall while working on your MS (of course, you don't learn much about agents this way- but it's still productive).
-Reveal your ms codes. (works the best if you have one file to work with.)
-Make sure ch titles/ch numbers are all consistently placed, and consistently sized. (equal lines above and below throughout the ms).
-Make sure all your indents are either indents or tabs for consistency. Never use both.
-Make sure there are NO spaces after the 'return' code, at each paragraph end.
-Make non-continuous section breaks after each chapter- so you can make footers labeling each chapter per section.
-Make sure your 'format' choice is consistent throughout. No 'body text' here and 'normal' there.
-Make sure your chapter titles are formated as some sort of 'header', so that if you wanted to make an index page, saying what pages chapters fall on.. it's ready to go.
-And lastly, when the last sentence of a paragraph ends with a single, or maybe two small words on the line, alter the rt margin of that paragraph to pull the last words up with the bulk of the paragraph. This is much more pleasing to the eye, and I've been able to decrease the ms page length by nearly 30 pages- just by doing this. Which can be VERY VERY important when an agent asks for 50 pages.. The only frustrating part is when you edit that same paragraph later on.. the margin width becomes wrongly adjusted, and you have to fix it. Also, the same should be done for pages. If there's three text lines on a page, because it's the end of a chapter, adjust margins throughout that chapter to pull those lines up into the previous page.
