Most writing is organized into paragraphs. These divisions make a document easier to read. There are ways you can control how paragraphs look on the screen. You can control how your program handles indention. You can often force the computer to indent the first line of every paragraph automatically. You can also frequently control the line spacing inside the paragraph, the amount of spacing between paragraphs, and the justification.
Justification refers to how the text is lined up between the margins. Most documents created with a typewriter or word processor are left-justified. That means that the left margin is lined up perfectly, but the right margin is a little ragged. The computer keeps track of the right margin for you when you use a word processor, so you don't have to press the "Enter" key at the end of every line (in fact you shouldn't press "Enter" at the end of every line. The only time you should press "Enter" is when you want to end a paragraph!) The automatic process the computer uses to send text to the next line is called word wrap. If you want to have the right margin line up cleanly, but let the left one be a little ragged (Maybe as you type the return address and date of a business letter) you can choose a right justify command. If you look at books and magazines, you will see that both the right and left columns are justified. Many word processors will allow you to justify both margins. This works by adjusting the amount of space between letters and words so the margins work out perfectly. The computer does it automatically when you ask it to do so. Another form of justification is centering. When you center a line, you tell the program to give it equal left and right margins, regardless of the length of the line. Centering is useful for headlines, but is often distracting when used for body text.
The other major element of a document is the page. There are some page formatting commands you should be able to find in any word processor as well. You will probably have some way to adjust the margins of the page. Note that there are top and bottom margins, as well as left and right margins.
You can also frequently find some kind of header/footer command. Headers and footers are special areas at the top and bottom, respectively, of the page. These areas are not used for regular text, but reserved for special things like a title at the top of every page, page numbers, and footnotes. You will have to experiment a little to see how your word processor handles these features, but they are well worth learning. You will never go back to the old way of writing footnotes once you have mastered using footers to automate the process.
One more page formatting command you might find useful is page orientation. Many word processors allow you to choose how information is printed on the page. The "up and down" orientation we are used to seeing on typewritten documents is called portrait mode. (If you think about painted portraits, they are usually up-and-down rectangles.) When your document is printed "sideways" it is referred to as landscape mode. (Landscape paintings are often oriented in this way.)
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| ___ | ________________
| /o o\ | | |
|| L | | | /WWW\ |
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|_/___\__| |______________|
Portrait Landscape
mode mode
Most of the time you should use portrait mode, but sometimes landscape mode is appropriate, especially when you are doing something special like tables, graphics, or fancy desktop publishing.