Most publications know what they’re looking for and offer writer’s guidelines either posted on their website or will mail them to you upon request. These guidelines are specifically put there to weed out what the publication doesn’t want; they have also been written to provide formatting guides so that if you’re work does get chosen it can be published with little to no difficulty. Any deviation from these guidelines will be at your own risk; most editors will simply ignore your submission but if you repeatedly ignore their guidelines you’ll quickly earn a bad reputation.