#INDENTING PARAGRAPHS PC#
If you’re using Word, press Ctrl-A on a PC or Cmmd-A on a Mac to select the whole document. The setting you want to change is located in your “Paragraph Settings” option. Since publishers want us to use indents instead of Tabs, it’s important to understand the difference and to use the correct one (indents). It’s much easier to set up a document correctly at the beginning, but it’s still easy to fix your Tabs later.
So what’s the difference? A Tab is a space inserted when you hit the Tab key, and it can be different for every line depending on what you do with those little Tab markers in the ruler along the top of your document.Īn indent is a paragraph setting you can set once, and it will apply consistently to every paragraph in your document (or in a particular section, if you want to get all fancy). The secret is to use indents instead of Tabs. And lately, publishers and formatters are becoming more vocal about asking writers to fix this before we submit our work. Now the publisher must go through and remove all of those Tabs-sometimes by hand-to get their formatting to play nice.Īt least, that’s what I gather from hearing publishers sigh loudly whenever the topic comes up. However, when a publisher gets a manuscript formatted with all of these Tabs everywhere, it can wreak havoc with their formatting or typesetting software.
Then we hit Tab again to fix the occasional goofy paragraph. Easy, right? After that, Word sometimes remembers we want to start every paragraph that way, so it puts in a Tab for us. So when we begin a new document, we simply press Tab to indent our first paragraph. But we writers often want our paragraphs to start with indents.
The problem is that the default setting in Word and some other word processors is to begin a paragraph without any indent at all. It’s apparently publishers’ biggest pet peeve we’ve never heard of. It’s not your fault-you can blame the default settings in your word processor.Īlthough I’ve been writing professionally for many (MANY) years, I only recently learned that editors and publishers absolutely hate when we use Tabs instead of indents to start a new paragraph. Based on my highly unscientific survey of some fellow writers, there’s a good chance you’ve been formatting your paragraphs wrong. When citing long quotations in a research paper, users typically use both a left and right indent to offset the quotation, as shown below.Brace yourself. To create a hanging indent, drag the marker on the ruler to the right. Hanging indents are often used when manually creating citations in a bibliography. A hanging indent occurs when the subsequent lines of a paragraph are indented more than the first. 5” mark, which can also be accomplished by pressing the Tab key to indent the first line to the default. Alternatively, indents can also be set by dragging the markers on the ruler: Indent ruler markersĪ first-line indent requires the user to drag the marker on the ruler to the position where the first line of the paragraph should begin. Precise indent definitions can be specified in the Paragraph dialog window which can be opened by clicking the Launcher button in the Paragraph group. Paragraph GroupĪ semi-block letter style requires the first line of each paragraph to be indented from the left margin, which is known as a first-line indent. Indents are measured in inches and Spacing is measured in point, much like font sizes. Alternatively, to make precise changes to the Left and/or Right Indents or Paragraph Before/After Spacing, utilize the Paragraph group of the Layout tab. Indenting paragraphs can be performed by pressing the Decrease Indent or Increase Indent buttons on the Paragraph tab of the Home tab. The default indents are 0 inches, meaning that lines of text extend from the left margin to the right margin. Paragraphs are indented relative to the page’s margins, and indenting a paragraph doesn’t affect the paragraph’s alignment. Users can indent the left or right edge of a paragraph, just the first line, or all lines except the first line. Indenting a paragraph results in moving the editable insertion point from the left or right margins.
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