"Did you type the page numbers and table of contents by hand?"
"What's wrong with that?"
"..."
"Hey! Why did you delete my table of contents? It took me ages to type! It says I have to include one! Why'd you delete it?"
"..."
"Hey! How'd it come back? What did you do?"
"..."
"You're not telling me? I know! You pressed the undo shortcut!"
"..."
Time ticked by.
Zhang Suannai gradually fell silent and stared blankly as her friend worked. Even without a word from her, watching her delete and redo all the formatting she had done herself was enough to make her realize she had gotten it all wrong.
"Done."
Chen Banxia stood up and stretched.
"That's it?"
"I can only say I've adjusted it to meet the current formatting requirements. Check it for typos, especially punctuation errors. I spotted several places where you mixed up commas and periods, and full-width and half-width characters. You've also got a bad habit of writing one long paragraph full of commas, with a period only at the very end. That's not great," Chen Banxia told her. "Once you've fixed those, send it to your advisor. He'll usually give it a rough check on the computer first, then ask you to print it out and bring it to him for another look. It's harder to spot things on a screen. With two printed papers side by side, any differences jump out at a glance."
Chen Banxia paused.
"And I don't know if your formatting requirements have been finalized yet. Sometimes the university fusses over all sorts of things and changes the requirements again and again. One minute they want this font size, the next they want another. Even if you've fixed everything, you might have to do it all over again."
"Uh..."