Call me old school. I started writing on typewriters. And that meant Courier was the font. (Actually I liked Elite a bit more, but I digress.) You typed your pages in Courier, and you typed them double spaced.
If you search online for manuscript formatting today, you find recommendations — and they are quite particular—for the same thing: Courier double-spaced.
Today at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, though, four working editors in traditional publishing said they pretty much hate Courier. They prefer Times New Roman 12pt double spaced, with 1″ margins all around, indenting each paragraph 1/2″—and create these indents using paragraph styles, not using tabs.
And do NOT use Courier. It was mentioned in the same breath as Comic Sans. Enough said? [Ed. note: This was before it became more popularly known that Comic Sans is actually a pretty good font for readers with dyslexia.]
So there it is, another data point.
For the record, we are fine with Courier for submissions, but we do agree about using Word Paragraph Styles. Learn Styles usage. Be kind to those working on your words downstream.