How to format paragraphs

Have you ever thought about how you arrange your writing into paragraphs? There’s more than one way of doing it.

In this post, I’ll look at:

• why paragraphs are important and need to be marked out clearly
• how not to do it
• the two usual formats: blocked and indented
• where each of these styles is commonly used
• how to use them effectively and efficiently in Word.

​Paragraphs: A quick lowdown

By breaking up your writing into paragraphs in a sensible way, you’ll help to guide your reader through it. A long ‘wall of text’ will be daunting, and will make it difficult for them to start reading it again after being interrupted.
 
It’s also important to make it very clear where a new paragraph is starting.
 
When should you start a new paragraph? I won’t go into this in great depth, as it isn’t really the point of this post, but here are two key guidelines:

• Each paragraph should cover a single ‘thought’ or theme.
• It’s good to vary the length of your paragraphs, but also to make them all reasonably short.

A trap to avoid

Here’s an extract from another of my blog posts. Can you see the problem?

But what do we mean by ‘short’ words? In written language, the most obvious measure is the number of letters. However, the number of syllables also makes a difference to readability – perhaps even more so.
On average, of course, the more letters a word has, the more syllables it has; but there are glaring exceptions. For example, let’s compare two words with similar meanings: area and zone. Both are nice and compact on the page, with just four letters – but area has three syllables, compared with just one in zone. Which is more plain? You could argue that area wins the day because it’s more familiar, but it’s a close call.

​Depending on how this shows up on your device, the problem might not be a glaring one, so I’ll explain it.

The sentence starting with ‘On average’ is meant to be the start of a new paragraph. But will the reader know this? If there’s a lot of space at the end of the previous line, it’ll be fairly clear, but the reader still might pause and wonder what’s going on. If there isn’t so much space, the reader might not notice that they’re moving on to a new paragraph. Either way, the ‘wall of text’ effect will make reading awkward.

​People do sometimes set out their paragraphs in this way, whether it’s as a matter of routine or just because of the occasional slip-up. It really is best avoided.

It’s a bit different if the text is justified – in other words, it’s squarely aligned with the right-hand margin, as below. This way, a gap at the end of a line will usually be obvious – but not always.

But what do we mean by ‘short’ words? In written language, the most obvious measure is the number of letters. However, the number of syllables also makes a difference to readability – perhaps even more so.
On average, of course, the more letters a word has, the more syllables it has; but there are glaring exceptions. For example, let’s compare two words with similar meanings: area and zone. Both are nice and compact on the page, with just four letters – but area has three syllables, compared with just one in zone. Which is more plain? You could argue that area wins the day because it’s more familiar, but it’s a close call.

​The two usual methods

The conventional paragraph formats are often known as blocked and indented.

With blocked paragraphing, there’s extra spacing between paragraphs, as in this post. Ideally, this doesn’t mean inserting a blank line after each paragraph, as that can seem a bit excessive. Instead, it’s better to just add some spacing between them – enough to make a clear separation. Unfortunately, on many websites (including this one), using blank lines is the only option.
​
When indented paragraphing is used, most paragraphs have indentation at the start of the first line. Usually, though, this doesn’t apply to the first paragraph of a piece of writing, or the first one after a heading – instead, those are full out (not indented).

Which format to use?

As you may have noticed, blocked paragraphing is by far the more common style in online material. It’s also often used in business documents, in short items such as leaflets, and those that feature a lot of images and graphics, such as brochures.

Meanwhile, the indented format is the usual choice for books, newspapers and magazines, at least in print form.

You won’t often see both spacing and indentation being used together, as there’s no real benefit to be gained from this – it creates more white space than there needs to be.

Some Word tips

If you’re using Microsoft Word to develop your text, the use of styles can be a great help in making your paragraph formatting consistent. You just need to make sure you always use the same style – or the appropriate one of two styles (see below) – for normal paragraphs, and then you can quickly adjust the formatting of all of them by just altering the relevant style(s).

If you’re using the blocked paragraph format, you’ll need to decide whether to have a full blank line after each paragraph or just a smaller amount of spacing, as mentioned earlier. For the former, simply hit the Return key twice at the end of each paragraph.

For smaller spacing, use the Format > Paragraph option, and then adjust the ‘Before’ and ‘After’ settings under ‘Spacing’. For example, 6 pt for both ‘Before’ and ‘After’ should produce good results. (Note: the ‘Line spacing’ settings aren’t relevant to this.) This way, each time you hit the Return key just once, you’ll see that extra spacing between the paragraphs. You’ll also need to use suitable styles for headings (see this other post of mine) and any other elements of content that will appear just above or below paragraphs.

If you’re using the indented style, remember that (by convention) it shouldn’t be used in the first paragraph, or the first one after a heading. So, you should use two styles: one for indented paragraphs and one for ‘full-out’ ones. For the former, use the Format > Paragraph option and adjust the ‘Left’ setting under ‘Indentation’ to something above zero. This will only affect the first line of each paragraph. For the style that you’re using for full-out paragraphs, the ‘Left’ setting should be zero.

​Getting help

If you hire a good editor or proofreader to help with your written material, they should be able to spot any problems in the paragraph formatting and advise you about potential changes.

But if you mostly get it right in the first place, you’ll help the editor or proofreader to focus more on the actual text rather than how it’s laid out.

I quite often need to provide notes such as ‘It’s unclear whether this is meant to be a new paragraph’, especially when checking PDF documents and web content, where I can’t check whether there’s a line break. You can avoid this kind of problem by just following the advice above. I hope you’ll find it useful.