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I teach document design. When I teach composition, I spend a significant amount of the semester on visual design. I’m also a scholar of visual design. Obviously, then, I care about design, perhaps unhealthily so. And I want everyone else to care, too. But, even if you can’t bring yourself to care about visual design, then you should still care about formatting requirements on assignment prompts and/or syllabi. Everything we put on these documents tells our students something about us, about what we value, and about what they should value

while the ability to follow conventions of all stripes is certainly important, the ability to understand, historicize, negotiate, and even resist those conventions is far more important. Formatting conventions do not exist in a vacuum, and while they are solidified in style guides and other texts, they are often fluid and change depending on technologies and rhetorical situations. For instance, the gold standard of student paper formatting exists for several reasons, not the least of which involves Microsoft’s push to use Times as the default font in word processors and web browsers. A knowledge of why those conventions exist, how to negotiate them, and the consequences for following and/or breaking them is far more useful for students than simply being forced to follow them blindly.