(no subject)

[Shannon Wade]

 I actually received a document like that this morning. It was a total
train wreck! Not only were there spaces used to align text (a personal
pet peeve of mine), no style was used to deal with a numbered list. And
the list was done in "Comment Text" when our company has and uses a very
clearly defined style for numbered lists. The scary part is that this
document repeated the number two. (The numbering was "1, 2, 2, 3) This
has been through at least 6 revisions and the writer didn't catch the
error. Can you all feel me cringing?

-----Original Message-----
From: Cloy Tobola [mailto:cloy.tobola at ndsu.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 12:43 PM
To: Shannon Wade
Cc: techwr-l at lists.techwr-l.com
Subject: Re: (no subject)

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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