MS Word Format Hanging Indent Widow Orphan Control and Those Extra Lines Between Paragraphs

This video will show you how to set some of the format characteristics for Microsoft Office document for MLA. A lot of things that typical academic writing requires are not the defaults in Microsoft Word. Most of Microsoft Word defaults are set for business applications, not for academic applications. So one thing you’ll want to do when you start a new Microsoft Word document is change the font to “Times New Roman,” change the font size to “12.” Then you’ll want to type in your own name.

And you’ll want to type in the name of the assignment. You want to type in my name and actually I believe I’ve got some of these things out of order, I think.

I actually asked you to type in the class and then these two things should be reversed. So, my name and then “Research Review.” This is all in the class packet as well.

But I’ll be showing you how to actually get the format look the way you want it. So then to Center you’ll have your title. And you want everything double spaced, no extra lines between the headings and the title, or the title and the text. So you’ll want to go Left-Justified. A couple of quick things about paragraphs.

If you have anything besides a “0” in the before or after spacing, or anything besides “zeros” in the left and right indentation you can get some unusual line breaks and also unusual spacing between paragraphs. So you don’t want any of these settings over here to be anything other than “0.” So you would Tab-in to start typing a paragraph. “This is my introduction” and then you would hit “Enter” and do the same and you could have another paragraph.

If you have “Auto” here or “6 pt” here, I think “6 pt” is the default, or here, you will get extra lines between paragraphs and there’s no way to delete those extra lines.

And you can see those in the preview down here. There’s no way to delete those extra lines because you can not move the, the, um, cursor to that space. So again, “0” here, double here, and you should be in good shape. When you are done writing your paper and you’re working on your Works Cited rather than just hitting Enter a million times to create a new page break, which I know a lot of students do, I recommend instead hitting “Insert,” “Page Break” and then you’ve got a new page. You can also make sure the page break starts a new paragraph format.

So what I would do here is write “Works Cited” and I would Center that. Go back up here and hit “Home,” “Center,” and then I would go Left-Aligned. A lot of students choose this right here to do a hanging indent, but that’s not actually a hanging indent paragraph.

That’s a Right-Aligned paragraph. To get a hanging indent paragraph you hit “Left-Aligned” and then you choose this little, again let me show you, cause it’s hard to see.

This tiny little arrow right here, click that. And then where it says “Special” choose “Hanging,” it automatically defaults to half inch and you will automatically have a paragraph, I’m just going to hit “X’s” here so you can see it. That is hanging indent and we’ll do that for every paragraph on this page, which just saves you a ton of time.

You’re not moving things around, trying to use the sliders. If you, if you view the ruler you can sometimes fix some of these things.

Click there, “View Ruler,” but even then you’re doing each one individually and it’s just much easier when you get to the Works Cited page to hit “Insert,” “Page Break,” and then format the paragraphs this way. By the way, I always recommend that you include the Works Cited page in the same Microsoft Word document. A lot of students seem to start a new Microsoft Word file, but then that means you have to upload two different files to turn them in. One other thing I’ll let you know is that there’s a function called “Widow Orphan Control.” And Widow Orphan Control is, um, a way of breaking the pages.

So a Widow is a first line of one paragraph where the rest of the lines from that paragraph are on the subsequent page. And an Orphan is the last line of the previous paragraph where there’s only one line at the beginning of a page.

So I always click off “Widow Orphan Control” otherwise you sometimes get unusual page breaks as well. So you click that off, click “OK” and you should be okay without having, um, unusual page breaks anywhere. So I hope that makes sense.

Again, to get the, um, uh, to get rid of spaces betwe.., extra lines between paragraphs it’s this area here. Make sure everything here says “0,” and “Auto” is not the same as “0.” And then, on hanging indent you click “Special,” choose “Hanging,” and it defaults to “5.” I hope this helps you guys out as you put the finishing touches on your papers and I’ll be checking email periodically between now and tomorrow evening. I probably will be off-line much of tomorrow mid-day while I watch the Ducks football game.

Alright, have fun writing it and let me know if you need any help.

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