The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 3: With Microsoft Word It's a Matter of Style
Steve Beisner -- February 20, 2006
Now that we've gained basic control over how Microsoft Word formats our manuscripts, we explore how we can achieve beginning-to-end consistency, even in a large manuscript, and how we can use paragraph styles for multiple formats of a manuscript: one way for revising and editing, another to save paper, and another for final copy... without changing much of anything!
Installments of The Silicon Amanuensis:
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 1: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 2: Microsoft Word Ate My Manuscript!
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 3: With Microsoft Word It's a Matter of Style
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 4: A Microsoft Word Template: Order From Chaos
In this article we'll once again follow that sometimes irritating practice of redefining words for a particular context. In this article, style does not have it's normal literary meaning. In the context of word processing and typesetting a style refers to a named set of formatting options to be applied to a portion of the manuscript. The word paragraph has a specific word processor meaning that is a little different, as well.
If you are like most of us, you may have used Microsoft Word or another word processor for years and not even been aware of the existence of of word processor styles, but virtually all word processors support styles and if, as a professional writer, you're not using them then your manuscripts are probably not as polished in appearance as they could be.
Ad Hoc Formatting
If you rely on the tab key to indent the first line of a paragraph, if you use toolbar buttons to center a title, if you insert multiple blank lines to create more space between paragraphs, then you're using ad hoc formatting. There's nothing wrong with this. It works well for letters, short notes, perhaps even for something as long as a short story. But as a document gets longer, inconsistencies creep in: the space between the chapter one title and first paragraph is not the same as for chapter twelve. The indentation of the block of quoted text in the first scene is different than the one in the last scene. Besides, though your editor likes wide margins, double spacing, and Courier font, you happen to prefer narrower margins, one-and-one-half spacing, and Times Roman font while you're revising and editing. The solution is to use styles instead of ad hoc formatting.
Formatting With Styles
Chances are you have your Word program set up to always show the "Formatting" toolbar. If not you can use the menu item, View|Toolbars|Formatting, to make it visible. You'll see a number of "drop down" boxes in the toolbar. One will display or set the font point size at the cursor. Another will display or set the font name: Times New Roman, Courier New, Arial, etc. And then there is another drop down box which probably says "Normal," or "Plain Text," or perhaps something else. That box allows you to display or set the paragraph style for the current paragraph (the paragraph which currently contains the insertion point or cursor). If you choose a different paragraph style in this drop down box, you'll see the current paragraph change its formatting according.
A paragraph, in the language of word processing means something slightly different than in normal usage. As you know, Word will automatically wrap the words of a paragraph near the right margin. It will start a new paragraph every time you use the ENTER or RETURN key. What you may not know is that the RETURN key in addition to forcing a paragraph break inserts an actual character, normally invisible. You can make these "paragraph" characters visible by pushing the button in the toolbar that is labeled with "¶". This will cause the end of each paragraph in the manuscript to be clearly marked with the "¶" character. The text between a paragraph character and the previous one is part of the paragraph.
Useful Hint: you can force a line break in Microsoft Word without starting a new paragraph by holding down the shift key when you press ENTER.
With paragraph characters visible, you'll notice that every piece of text is actually a paragraph, ending with the paragraph character. So titles and subtitles are paragraphs, as well as the blocks of related sentences that are paragraphs in our usual sense of the word. You'll also notice that the extra lines of spacing you may have inserted by hitting RETURN are also paragraphs: empty ones containing only the paragraph character. Later we'll see how to eliminate the need for these empty paragraphs by creating paragraph styles which produce extra space before or after the paragraph's text.
Typical screen showing style selection drop-down on formatting toolbar, paragraph marks visibility button on main toolbar, and with visible style names at the left. This is for Apple, but it's much the same for windows.
This is probably a good place to note that Word actually has so called "character styles" in addition to "paragraph styles". Character styles apply only to characters within a paragraph. They are infrequently used, and we won't mention them further.
To use styles effectively you need to have a defined style for each paragraph type. For authors of fiction you might have a different style for novel title, short story title, first paragraph (of chapter or scene), normal paragraph, space break, extended quote (indented and set off from the main text), epigrammatic text (set off from main text and italicized), and others, depending on your preferences and the kind of work you're creating.
An easy way to work with styles is to create a template document, say DummyNovel.doc and define all your styles in that document. (When I say "template" or "template document" I mean simply an ordinary Word document that can be copied and used as a basis for some other document. I'm not referring to MS Word's special "template" files -- something a little different.) To create a styled manuscript you begin editing the template document, but immediately "Save-as" the name of your new work. Then you can edit the manuscript as usual and apply the style definitions contained in the template as you work.
If you want to add styling to an existing manuscript you can again open the template document and copy/paste the text from the existing manuscript into the template document before saving it under a new name.
To apply a style to a paragraph, just position the cursor anywhere within the paragraph and use the toolbar's drop down box of styles to select the new style for the paragraph.
You can see the style of the paragraph containing the cursor in the style drop-down box on the formatting toolbar. You can also set a view preference (Apple) or view option (Windows) to have the style of each paragraph displayed along the left edge, as in the screen shot, above.
Defining Styles
So far we haven't said how to define styles. The menu selection Format|Style... will open a dialog box that will allow you to both change the definition of existing styles and define new styles. Unfortunately different versions of Microsoft Word have slightly different versions of the create/edit styles dialogs, so you'll have to play around with it, but spending a couple of hours experimenting and creating your own template manuscript document that contains your own styles is a good investment.
There are a half-dozen or so different aspects of formatting you can define for each style, but the most important are font characteristics and various aspects of paragraph spacing: first line indent, inter-line spacing, space before and after the paragraph, etc. You may also notice that a style can be defined as "based on" another style, which means that if an aspect of a style is not explicitly defined then that aspect will be inherited from the base style. For example, if all your text paragraph styles are based on the style "SimpleText," then by changing the font or inter-line spacing of SimpleText, it's possible to change these characteristics of the entire manuscript.
In a later installment of The Silicon Amanuensis I'll present a template document containing a set of styles that I use for short stories and novels. You can use it "as is" in your own work or adapt it to your own preferences. I'll also present some tricks of the trade for producing multiple formats of the same manuscript and for easily finding one's way around even the largest manuscript -- all thanks to the use of styles.
Check Ink Byte soon for the next installment of The Silicon Amanuensis.