Extra Paragraph Breaks Between ParagraphsĪnother common mistake authors make is adding two or more paragraph breaks between paragraphs (hitting Enter more than once at the end of a paragraph). Microsoft Word’s default Normal style in older versions of Word is set to not add space between paragraphs by default so authors learned to add them in manually with extra paragraph breaks instead of modifying the style settings. See also: Word Tips For Writers: First Line Indents Using Styles (video) 2. When you send your document to your book designer they will not need to remove any tabs or spaces, which will speed up your job and reduce the possibility of errors (plus your designer will love you). Now, when you type your text into Word using the Normal style and hit Enter to start a new paragraph, it will be indented automatically and no extra spaces or tabs should be used. Then check Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style. Under the Indents and Spacing tab, navigate to Special: First Line and enter 0.25. Click on Modify.Ĭlick on the Format button at the bottom of the window that appears.
In Word 2016 right-click the Normal style in the Home / Styles ribbon. Instead of adding the indentation with spaces or tabs, you should be changing the style settings for the style you are using for the chapter text, if using Word’s defaults this would likely be the Normal style. Authors mistakenly create an indent manually so they can distinguish paragraph breaks without realizing they should be modifying the style to do this automatically. The reason many people do this is the default Normal style in Microsoft Word is set to not indent the first line of a paragraph.
If you used extra spaces or tabs to create a first line indent in your document, they will need to delete them from your document. When formatting, your book designer will use style settings to set the first line paragraph indent. You should not use extra spaces or tabs to indent the first line of each paragraph. This will show you all of the formatting markup in your Word document. If you can’t find it, you can also press Ctrl + * as a shortcut. The location for this in Word 2016 is shown below. The first thing you will want to do is view the formatting markup by toggling on the Show / Hide icon in Microsoft Word. If you are not sure which find/replace command to use to correct your issue, leave a comment describing your scenario and I will reply back with a Find and Replace for you to try. If you have a document already written in Word and it has some of these issues, don’t worry too much! There are many Find and Replace commands you can use in Word to correct them, which I detail below.