Aligning text

With the graphic elements placed in the document, we can turn our attention to working with text alignment and spacing. By adjusting these things, we can make our document more attractive and easier to read. 

Adjusting paragraph spacing

You may notice that there is extra space around the headings in the document. The heading styles include spacing before and after the text. This spacing can be adjusted to add or remove white space in the document. Let's see how to do this.

Microsoft Word considers any text between two hard returns to be a paragraph. (A hard return occurs when the Enter key or Return key is pressed on the keyboard.) Because of this, a paragraph may not look like a traditional paragraph with a topic sentence and supporting sentences. In a document, a paragraph may be several sentences, a single word, or even a blank line. 

When formatting a paragraph, it is not necessary to select the text. By having the cursor anywhere within the paragraph, any paragraph formatting changes will be applied to all of the text.

For Microsoft Word users, there is a tool that will show you where your paragraphs start and stop. 

When the formatting marks are visible, we can see where paragraphs start and stop, spaces, and tabs. Paragraphs are marked by a pilcrow (¶). This symbol will reflect the size and formatting of the corresponding paragraph. Spaces are shown as dots. And tabs are small arrows. If a paragraph contains formatting, a small black square appears to the left of the text.

The Paragraph dialog box opens: 

The Heading 1 style has 24 points of space before the paragraph and 6 points after the paragraph. Let's adjust the Before and After spacing to put a small amount of space before the heading and even less after the heading. 

The spacing has been adjusted for the selected paragraph. We will need to update the Heading 1 style to update the other headings. 

The spacing around all of the Heading 1 paragraphs has been adjusted. 

Now let's modify the spacing around the Heading 2 paragraphs to be the same as the Heading 1 style, 8 pts before and 4 pts after. 

Indenting text

Indenting text can enhance the look of your document. By indenting text, you can draw your reader's eye to something important or make room for graphic elements. Single lines or entire paragraphs can be indented. 

Considering inclusive design

When working with text alignment, it is important to consider that left-aligned text is the most inclusive. Centered, right-aligned, or justified text can be difficult for many people to read. When paragraphs are centered, it takes longer for a human eye to find the beginning of each line resulting in slower reading and comprehension. Justified text can contain too much or too little white space which can distract the reader. 

Taking all of that into consideration, there are still style guides that require some text to be indented. 

Indenting the first line of text

Authors will have to decide whether or not to indent the first line of each paragraph. In some instances, this is a personal choice and will depend on how you want your document to look. Other times indention is determined by the style guide you are following. 

Indenting the first line of a paragraph is done by placing the cursor at the beginning of the first line and pressing the Tab key. While tab settings can be adjusted, by default Microsoft Word indents one-half inch each time the Tab key is pressed. 

Let's indent the first line of the first paragraph of text.

The first line of text moves one-half inch to the right. 

Again, depending on the style guide you are using or your personal preference, you may decide you don't want to indent the first line of each paragraph. Let's remove this indentation now.

Indenting an entire paragraph

You may want to indent an entire paragraph to add visual appeal to your document, to draw your reader's eye to important text, or to make room for other elements. Long quotes are often indented to highlight the quote and remove the need for quotation marks.

Towards the end of the document, there is a long quotation from Lady Bird Johnson. Let's indent this quote and remove the quotation marks.

With the text indented and the quotation marks removed, the quote should look similar to this: 

Centering content

There is another quote in our document. It's not a long quotation and therefore does not need to be indented. But we can do some additional formatting to draw our readers to the quote.

In Microsoft Word, there are four standard alignment options. Left align (where the text is lined up on the left side of the page) is the default. We also have the choice to center (center on the page), right align (line up on the right side of the page), or justify (lined up on both the right and left sides of the page) the text. 

Let's center the quote and then format the font. Centering the text is a paragraph format and does not require us to select the text. But we will need to select the text to apply font formatting.

Applying a hanging indent

A hanging indent is a special kind of indentation where the first line of text is aligned to the left of the page and the other lines of text are indented one-half an inch. This type of indentation is often used for bibliographic citations.

Let's apply hanging indents to the sources in the works cited list. 

The first source is now indented correctly:

While the process of applying a hanging indent is relatively simple, it could become cumbersome if you have a long list of citations. Microsoft Word has a keyboard shortcut (Control key + T) that makes the process much easier. Additionally, we can select multiple citations and apply the indent to all of them at the same time. 

The list of sources is now correctly formatted.