We click on Word’s Home tab, then click on the button showing the paragraph symbol, also called the pilcrow ( ¶ ). So why does this text show a half-inch indent on some lines? Let’s take a look at the hidden characters to find out. Notice that both the top and bottom tabs are set to flush left. But look at the ruler at the top of the text, particularly that left-hand margin slider. Here’s a screenshot part of the bibliography section of a paper I recently edited.Īt first glance, everything looks good. At ProofreadingPal, we often work on papers by grad students and PhD candidates-scholars who’ve written hundreds of pages of academic prose in their careers-and improperly formatted references are by far one of the most common issues we see.īefore we learn some simple techniques for formatting a proper automated hanging indent, we should understand why it matters.
#GET RID OF FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD MANUAL#
This formatting is often found in the bibliography sections of academic papers it is mandated, for instance, in the APA Publication Manual, the MLA Handbook, and Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers (which is basically Chicago), the most commonly used style guides in the humanities and social sciences.īecause it’s counter-intuitive, the hanging indent flummoxes even highly educated writers. The first line of each paragraph is un-indented (or “flush left”), whereas each subsequent line is indented a half-inch. Put simply, a hanging indent is the opposite of a standard indent.
#GET RID OF FIRST LINE INDENT IN WORD FREE#
Get your free sample back in 3 to 6 hours! But there’s another kind of indent, found almost exclusively in academic writing: the hanging indent. My point in all this is that the first-line indent, by virtue of being so ubiquitous, seems quite intuitive and natural. Whatever its origins, this quirk has become firmly entrenched as a convention of online writing. Early programming languages had no standardized command for rendering a tab indent onscreen at the same time, onscreen text was not bound by the size constraints of newsprint, meaning you could insert blank lines with gay abandon without ever having to worry about wasting paper. The reasons for this are rooted in the contrasting technical limitations of online and print media.
Rather curiously, online texts like this blog do not generally use an indentation to signal the start of a new paragraph, but rather insert a blank line between paragraphs. You’ve probably done it yourself if you’ve ever kept a diary or hand-written a letter. Now, a simple indent at the start of each paragraph is something you see every day, probably without even noticing, in nearly all printed books, magazines, and newspapers.
In our last look into the mysteries of Microsoft Word, we explored the ruler function, particularly using this tool to automate indentation of text.
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