Sorry Tricia it's taken me a bit to respond back. It's been a crazy past few days (previous post).
The shadow is to double layer the letters. Like if you want to do an A and then if you do shadow it will cut in out perfect so it can fit behind the letter.
If you type in your word to cut and do the "Real Dial Size", this should give you the word in a straight line.
Here's some information I had saved about the settings:
TIPS TREASURE CHEST - Will the Cricut cut out a font smaller than 1”?
This is a good question and concern. We had to balance the size choices between what the machine could literally cut at with the majority of images, considering heavily the more detailed images that, going too small, just chew up the paper. So 1" is where the bottom dial setting ended up. However, there are a couple of ways that images can get smaller.
The default is proportional sizing, meaning that the 1" setting is for the tallest character of a font. For instance, a lower case "a" set at 1" dial size will actually come out at about ½" because it needs to proportionately go with a larger letter, say an upper case "A". The upper case will come out at about 1". You can turn this off and literally cut the exact dial size for every character by pressing the Real Dial Size button.
Many of the Creative Features enclose a letter or shape inside a larger shape that comes out VERY small. For instance the "Sign" feature on George. With this selected, the inner cut of the letter or shape itself comes out MUCH smaller than 1". There is a feature that affects the cut like this on nearly every cartridge. So we had to keep that in mind when we looked at the overall range of the size dial and smallest possibility combined.
http://www.cricut.com/movies/
At this site they also have movies to help you learn your machine.
Have you made anything yet?? I'll post my name picture frames either today or tomorrow.