- STANDARD SIZE OF THE FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD MANUAL
- STANDARD SIZE OF THE FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD FREE
With that done, you’ll see that the paragraph breaks at the end of each entry are still in place our search string only deletes the combined occurrence of a hard return followed by a tab. This process is easy to automate using the Find and Replace feature. So appropriately, with just a couple of steps, we can reformat this text for maximum usability while leaving the hanging indent intact.įirst, let’s get rid of those unnecessary hard returns and tabs. The whole point of using electronic word processing in the first place, instead of a typewriter or steno pad, is to make your text more usable, to allow readers to view your work using the paper, printer, and type size that best suit them. We would see similar havoc if we changed the font size or sought to format the page to print on anything other than 8.5 x 11 paper. Look what a mess we’ve made just by changing the font from Times New Roman to Georgia, just for instance! Lines break in the middle of phrases indentations seem to come at random. This looks OK for now, but the effect is only sustainable if you don’t change a single parameter.
STANDARD SIZE OF THE FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD MANUAL
In other words, he’s created the appearance of a hanging indent with manual formatting. Our scholar has put a hard return at the end of every line, and has manually indented some lines with a tab. This lets us see all the formatting marks that normally remain invisible when we view text onscreen. We click on Word’s Home tab, then click on the button showing the paragraph symbol, also called the pilcrow ( ¶ ). So why does this text show a half-inch indent on some lines? Let’s take a look at the hidden characters to find out. Notice that both the top and bottom tabs are set to flush left. But look at the ruler at the top of the text, particularly that left-hand margin slider. Here’s a screenshot part of the bibliography section of a paper I recently edited.Īt first glance, everything looks good. At ProofreadingPal, we often work on papers by grad students and PhD candidates-scholars who’ve written hundreds of pages of academic prose in their careers-and improperly formatted references are by far one of the most common issues we see.īefore we learn some simple techniques for formatting a proper automated hanging indent, we should understand why it matters. This formatting is often found in the bibliography sections of academic papers it is mandated, for instance, in the APA Publication Manual, the MLA Handbook, and Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers (which is basically Chicago), the most commonly used style guides in the humanities and social sciences.īecause it’s counter-intuitive, the hanging indent flummoxes even highly educated writers. The first line of each paragraph is un-indented (or “flush left”), whereas each subsequent line is indented a half-inch. Put simply, a hanging indent is the opposite of a standard indent.
STANDARD SIZE OF THE FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD FREE
Get your free sample back in 3 to 6 hours! But there’s another kind of indent, found almost exclusively in academic writing: the hanging indent. My point in all this is that the first-line indent, by virtue of being so ubiquitous, seems quite intuitive and natural.
Whatever its origins, this quirk has become firmly entrenched as a convention of online writing. Early programming languages had no standardized command for rendering a tab indent onscreen at the same time, onscreen text was not bound by the size constraints of newsprint, meaning you could insert blank lines with gay abandon without ever having to worry about wasting paper. The reasons for this are rooted in the contrasting technical limitations of online and print media. Rather curiously, online texts like this blog do not generally use an indentation to signal the start of a new paragraph, but rather insert a blank line between paragraphs. You’ve probably done it yourself if you’ve ever kept a diary or hand-written a letter. Now, a simple indent at the start of each paragraph is something you see every day, probably without even noticing, in nearly all printed books, magazines, and newspapers. In our last look into the mysteries of Microsoft Word, we explored the ruler function, particularly using this tool to automate indentation of text.