Tutorial

The Enter key is not the "I want some more space here" key

Five reasons to press Enter only once to end a paragraph

This page asserts a very simple rule: press Enter once at the end of every paragraph.

If you are going to follow this rule, you need to be able to see where you have pressed Enter. To do that, click the ¶ button on the Standard Toolbar. That will display end-of-paragraph markers shown as a ¶. These markers don't print. They are there to help you see how your document is constructed.

Here are some ideas about why you should press Enter only once at the end of each paragraph:

1. The ¶ sign is an end-of-paragraph marker.

The ¶ sign is not an "I want to put some vertical space here" marker.

2. Word's fundamental unit is a paragraph.

A typewriter doesn't understand anything about the formatting of your document. It just plonks characters on the page. Word is cleverer than that. It knows what a paragraph is, and it defines a paragraph with the end-of-paragraph marker (¶).

That means that you don't ever want to see "empty" paragraphs in Word. If you had empty paragraphs, your screen would look something like this:

This is not how to use Word.

3. If you put an empty paragraph between each paragraph of text, you double the number of paragraphs in the document.

The following obviously consists of two paragraphs of text. But Word thinks that it is four paragraphs of text.

4. Empty paragraphs upset the flow of text from page to page

Word knows how big your pieces of paper are, and it knows where your top and bottom margins are. Word flows text from page to page. If the first line of text in the previous example ("Tomorrow I am going to the gym") happened to be the last text that would fit on this page, Word would put the next, empty, paragraph at the top of the next page. Not a good look.

Of course you could delete some empty paragraph marks to solve this problem, but it's a short-term solution. The minute you add or delete text, or change the margins, or change the size of the text, the pagination will have to change. So your short-term solution has to be fixed up, and you'll have to create another short-term solution at the point where the page now breaks.

5. Don't wear out your little finger

Lastly, life's too short to wear our the little finger of your right hand pressing Enter twice as many times as you need to.

But how do I put space after a paragraph?

If you use a typewriter, and you want vertical space after each paragraph (like the paragraphs on this page), the only solution is to use the carriage return twice at the end of every paragraph.

In Word, if you want a space after the paragraph, you will have to tell Word "I want space after the paragraph". What is actually likely, however, is that you want to tell Word "I want space after every paragraph of body text, and while you're at it, I'd like some extra space before every major heading. Oh ... and now I think about it, I want a really big space after the Title of my document."

To achieve that, you'll have to do two things:

• You'll have to tell Word which paragraph is the title, which paragraphs are headings, and which are body text.
• You'll need to tell Word how much space before or after paragraphs you want for your title, your headings, and your body text paragraphs.

How to do those two things is the subject of Basic Concept 3: Use styles to format text.