Cockeyed Optimist

Aug 15 2007

3. Why Bother with Microsoft Word Paragraph Styles?

Published by Geoff

OK, so you’ve been a good person and done all the preliminary stuff that I talked about in the first two of these articles, and now you start actually writing!

Nine times out of ten you’ll want to start off with a main heading, for instance, the title of your essay, and maybe your name and school, and then you’ll start your essay with the first heading, and then the text itself.

So you write, let’s see:

The Use of Riddles in the Works of Charles Farnsbarns
by Louise MacGillicuddy
School of Sarcastic Literature
Introduction
When we survey the short novels and plays of Farnsbarns, we are first struck
by his facility in choice of vocabulary; his prose exudes a sense of period
in every line, because the words he chooses are not the ones we use today.
And the next stylistic device we notice is his syntax, which again evokes
an unfamiliar mood....

Ok, you look at this and say to yourself “How can I make the title stand out, and then my name, so people can tell where the essay proper starts?”

So you select the title, and make it bigger, say 16 point, and change the font from Courier to Arial, bold, and center it. That looks good. Then you make your byline and school a bit smaller, still in Arial, but not bold, and right-justified. That looks good, too.

Then you make the heading ‘Introduction’ bold, but in Times 12 pt, and left-justified, and then, at last, you start on the text, in Times 12 pt, regular. To separate paragraphs, you leave a blank line.

[I can’t show you this exactly, because I’m writing in HTML, but you will get the idea.]

The Use of Riddles in the Works of Charles Farnsbarns

by Louise MacGillicuddy
School of Sarcastic Literature

Introduction

When we survey the short novels and plays of Farnsbarns, we are first struck by his facility in choice of vocabulary; his prose exudes a sense of period in every line, because the words he chooses are not the ones we use today.

And the next stylistic device we notice is his syntax, which again evokes an unfamiliar mood….

Well, all this will work OK, but what are you missing by doing all this ‘by hand’, instead of using Microsoft Word paragraph styles?

Several things you have missed

Every time you need a new heading you will have to do it all again.
You’ll have to try to remember what font, size and so on you used.
And most important of all, if you change your mind about how it looks, you will have to go back and change each one, one at a time.
And you’ve done nothing yet about the actual paragraphs of text: whether you want spaces between them, or whether you want the first line to be indented.

So, what should you have done?

Set up a style for your title.

First of all, select your title (Riddles etc,).

Make sure the Formatting toolbar is showing. It looks like this:

(If it’s not showing, go to the View menu and fix this - you can work out how).

Change the font and size to what you want, with the appropriate drop-downs, and hit the ‘Bold’ button, and the ‘centered’ icon.

Then , when it all looks right, type ‘TITLE; where ‘Normal’ is now, and hit return.

Let go, and your title will have the ‘Title’ style you wanted, and you will be able to select that style any time you want in the future, using the first pull-down.

You can repeat this procedure for your ‘Author’ and ‘School’ styles, and for your major heading style for your ‘Introduction’ (you may want lesser headings later on).
Next you can fix your paragraph style; you could call it ‘My Body’ or something.
First fix up the font and the size, as you did for the headings.

Finally you can specify the rest of the attributes you want.

(Make sure your paragraph is selected first.)

This is done with the Word Format>Paragraph menu item, which gives you the following panel:

You can now specify everything you want about your paragraph: alignment, first line indent, line spacing, font, size, space before, space after - everything.

Then you can go back to the formatting toolbar and change the style name to ‘My Body’ and you’re done!

So, now you know how to set up paragraph styles, but what are they good for?

As already mentioned, if you decide later on that you want to change the look of your document, all you have to do is change particular styles, and this will immediately take effect throughout the whole file.
You can go to the View>Outline menu item, which will give you this toolbar: