(no subject)

[Cloy Tobola]

Shannon Wade asked:
> ...snip...
 > Can anyone tell me why I shouldn't have blank paragraphs
 > or shed ANY light on the other issue?
> ...snip...

Shannon,

You would avoid extra paragraphs for the same reason you avoid wordiness 
-- it's extra, meaningless content that clutters your document.

If you needed to force a page break, you would not do it by inserting 
unnecessary words to make a paragraph longer. Same thing with line 
breaks. Use formatting tools to format your document, not superfluous 
content.

The other reason not to use extra line breaks is that they mess up the 
format if the document settings (e.g., margins, headers, footers, 
gutters) change. This can happen if you move to a different computer or 
change printers.

Once you've had to reformat a document where someone has done this, 
you'll see what a colossal pain in the keister it can be. Other "foolish 
formatting" I've seen include...

  -manually inserting periods to create a "dot leader" (like you'd use 
in a table of contents)
  -using spaces to align or center text
  -using tabs to create columns
  -people still putting two spaces between sentences

Excelsior!  -Cloy

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Cloy Tobola
ITS Communications Coordinator
Information Technology Services
North Dakota State University
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