<p>I have nothing fancy-no italics, etc. only staples of language such as apostrophes, dashes and indentations; however, the online app is eliminating paragraph indents, all contractions are missing their apostrophes, and dashes are eliminated. What specific format did you guys who had successful uploads upload your document in? Any suggestions on how to make it work or should I just mail it?</p>
<p>well, the indents or the line breaks dont work, but if u just copy-paste it on to the space provided, u get the apostrophes , etc.</p>
<p>The elimination of apostrophes and dashes comes from the fact that Microsoft Word, when you type in a hyphen or apostrophe, puts in its own cute little character instead of leaving it in ASCII. The easiest way to fix this is to go to your essay in Word and do Find And Replace, and replace the fancy apostrophes/dashes with the regular ones.</p>
<p>For paragraph indents, I suggest just copy and pasting the essay into the box they give you, and manually going through and pressing the enter key.</p>
<p>^Or else you could type your essay in a plaintext editor.</p>
<p>(The same problem exists with the blogs -- apparently several of the bloggers like to write in Word. When I went through and fixed blog formatting last summer in preparation for the move to mitadmissions.org, I had to fix so many dash, quote, and ampersand problems. Argh.)</p>
<h2>yea i just pasted the text in the boxes and it seemed to work out fine- since you can't do line breaks, i separated some sections in my additional information page using lines like this</h2>
<p>Is that really shabby, or will they understand that I was just tinkering with some not-so-user friendly formatting?</p>
<p>Would they care that much if the first paragraph wasnt indenting no matter what you tried?</p>
<p>Oops, I didn't see this until after I submitted. Meaning my essay has no quotation marks, apostrophes, etc. Is this horrible? I'm sending a hard copy tomorrow with a letter of explanation, should that be okay?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Is that really shabby, or will they understand that I was just tinkering with some not-so-user friendly formatting?
[/quote]
Yes.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Would they care that much if the first paragraph wasnt indenting no matter what you tried?
[/quote]
No.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'm sending a hard copy tomorrow with a letter of explanation, should that be okay?
[/quote]
Yes.</p>
<p>I know you are all just nervous, but in all seriousness, the admissions officers at MIT are reasonable people. They understand the system they're using and the effects it has.</p>