Industry Formatting Standards
Margins, sluglines, action, and dialogue — the exact rules that make your script look professional, and why the software should carry most of the load.
Here's a secret the software companies would rather you didn't fully realize: screenplay formatting is about 90% automated. Load up a proper screenwriting program, and it handles the margins, the capitalization, the spacing, the page breaks. Your job isn't to memorize the rules — it's to recognize them, so you know when something's off and you can talk to other professionals in their language.
So this chapter isn't a rulebook to cram. It's a tour. Learn to see the shape of a page, and the format becomes invisible — which is exactly the point.
The anatomy of a formatted page
Every screenplay page is built from the same handful of components, each with its own fixed position. Once you can name them, you can read any script like a technician:
- Scene heading / slugline — ALL CAPS, flush left. INT. or EXT., the location, then the time of day: INT. DINER – NIGHT.
- Action — full-width, present tense, describing only what we see and hear. Introduce a character's name in CAPS the first time they appear.
- Character cue — the speaker's name, indented to roughly 3.7" from the left, in CAPS, right above their lines.
- Dialogue — indented under the cue, in a narrower column so the eye tracks it as speech.
- Parenthetical — a brief (beat) or acting note, used sparingly, tucked under the cue.
The technical baseline everyone shares: 12-point Courier, one-inch margins, page numbers top-right. Courier isn't nostalgia — it's a monospaced font, so every page holds a consistent amount, which is what makes one page equal roughly one minute of screen time.
The mistakes that scream "amateur"
Readers can spot an unpracticed writer before finishing page one, and it's almost never the story that gives it away. It's the format tells: camera directions everywhere (CLOSE ON, PAN TO, WE SEE) — directing from the page is the director's job, not yours. Dense, novelistic action blocks — keep them to three or four lines, white space is your friend. Dialogue that runs half a page — real speech is interrupted, brief, alive. And a title page cluttered with copyright stamps and WGA numbers — name, contact, title. That's it.
When a First AD picks up your script to schedule the shoot, they read sluglines first — every INT/EXT and time-of-day tells them a lighting setup, a location move, a chunk of the day. Sloppy or inconsistent headings don't just look bad; they cost real hours on a real set. Clean formatting is a professional handshake with the people who'll actually make your film.
Let the tool do the work
You don't need to buy expensive software to start. What matters is using a tool built for screenplays so the format is automatic and correct — freeing you to think about story instead of tab stops. Write in it from day one, and you'll internalize the shape of a page without ever studying a single margin measurement.
Next, we move from how a script looks to how it sells: writing the logline — the single sentence that has to capture your entire movie.
Once you've written your screenplay, use the Table Read tool to hear it performed aloud by AI voices. It instantly reveals pacing issues, flat dialogue, and scenes that drag — the things you can't catch on the page.