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Early 1990s Document Formatting: Excellent Margins, Please
Did your school have this procedure for your homework?
2 min readApr 14, 2025
The middle school I attended from Fall 1990 to Spring 1994 gave this instruction for submitting to the student literary magazine, The Cauldron.
When I came across this piece of paper today, I wondered: Why were the teachers making a big deal about the margins in a word processing document?
It took me a minute to recall what the process and goal was.
The teachers wanted us to learn to type.
They may have wanted us to get in the habit of saving our file to a disk.
But they didn’t want our files on disks. That wasn’t a valid delivery method. A digital file wasn’t the “real thing.” The text became real when it was on paper. They wanted us to print out our documents and hand them the pieces of paper.
