WHEN A WRITER HAS NOT YET LEARNED how to use Styles, she applies formatting manually. For example, to format a title, she might select the title, apply bold formatting, make it a slightly larger font size, and center it. Applying formatting in this manner is called “direct formatting.” If you […]
OF ALL THE FEATURES offered by word processing programs, you may be most familiar with formatting text and paragraphs — commonly changing fonts, bolding, italicizing, and underlining. In its essence, formatting involves selecting text and then applying a format command using menus or buttons. In this article, I’ll show you […]
IN PART 7 OF WORD FOR WRITERS, I covered how to manage page breaks. Today, we’ll talk about section breaks. Many people work with Word for years without ever understanding or using Word’s sections. This may be due to the fact that many Word documents are only a single section. In […]
Do you habitually use paragraph returns to move text to the next page? Did you know that you can insert a page break anywhere in your document, automatically forcing the following text to a new page, and that you can control how and where Microsoft Word positions automatic page breaks? […]
In this post, the 2nd in a series on Microsoft Word for Writers. Last time, I talked about why you want to improve your Word skills. In this post, I outline the subjects I’ll be covering during the series. If your working knowledge of Word is limited, the list may seem overwhelming […]
Most writers I know use Microsoft Word, or a Word-compatible word processing program. Even those of us who use other authoring programs, such as Scrivener, rely on Word on a daily basis to polish formatting and share our work with others. Yet, as an editor and writing teacher, I am frequently astonished by […]
