Here are some ways of finishing off your document attractively, plus some time- and grief-saving tips
Make sure you have the necessary information on the essay printout. Some details are obvious enough:
...should all be at the top of the document and/or on a cover sheet
Others are highly desirable:
Tip: Headers and footers You could put a lot of this information in the 'header and footer' space of each page. This is the strip at top and bottom where Word-processors put the page numbers, and so on. I normally put the page number, my name and the document title in small characters in the 'header', and the complete filename and date in even smaller characters in the 'footer'. This way, even if I find a loose sheet kicking around on the floor, I immediately know where it comes from.
A cover sheet on the front of the essay can be both attractive and useful. It should include the project title (or precise wording of the essay question) and all relevant details. It is especially good for extra copies of assessed essays you present, for return with comments. They give the marker plenty of room to provide these...
While writing the essay you can use the space for a temporary ‘to do’ checklist, to be erased and left blank when printing out.
Tip: Use a checklist when writing your essay. I find it useful to keep a temporary list of things to do actually within the document file, at the top, just under the title. Here you can put short reminders of remaining tasks, especially the easy-to-forget last things before printout, like word-count, final spell-check, and double-spacing body text. Once you have finished everything, you just have to remember to erase the checklist...!
Tip: Make yourself a document template. Don't keep 'reinventing the wheel' by having to set up the document parameters and layout afresh every time you start a new assignment! To save yourself work, if you get fairly experienced with a more advanced word-processor such as Word for Windows, you could make a standard master document or template for essays and cover sheets, which you can keep on allocated hard-disk space, and/or on floppy disk (as a back-up). It can have everything all ready to go, including pagination, line-spacing and paragraph layouts, heading and subheading settings, along with your name, college, date/time and filename fields all in place. Just open a copy, modify as needed, and off you go. You can then concentrate more on the essay content...
Tip: Keep copies, both of final printouts, and the computer files. If you don't do so already, after every substantial session of work, make a back-up of your word-processed documents and keep it in a safe place, in another building. This may seem obvious, but most of us have a disaster from forgetting this sooner or later!