Freelance Amy

What Are Microsoft Word Paragraph Styles?

Woman typing while using Microsoft Word styles on her laptop — Image by free stock photos from www.picjumbo.com from Pixabay

The last time I wrote about MS Word, someone told me that Word is a four-letter word in their book. Seems a bit extreme, albeit literal. I particularly like MS Word and its paragraph styles function, but perhaps that’s because I’ve been using it for decades and came to design much later on.

In fact, my fellow designer friends tend to be the most passionate in their utter loathing. That makes sense given how powerful Adobe products like InDesign can be in producing engaging publications.

Necessary Evil

Sure, it can be buggy and Office 365 updates can be supremely annoying. For example, the onslaught of modern comments has resulted in incessant migraines for copy editors round the world, or at least those in my community. And back when Word switched up track changes, it took me a while to figure out how to use simple markup properly.

However, Word paragraph styles have made life so much simpler for those who know about them. I guess that’s the issue, though: most people, who are not designers anyway, don’t know about them!

Most people, in fact, continue to use multiple paragraph breaks and character spaces instead of page or section breaks; paragraph indents; table spacing; and white space around images, headings, and figures.

Sound Familiar?

Does that sound like you? And is your response the following: “Wait, what? That’s not how you’re supposed to do it?”

Man looking at his laptop with a frustrated expression on his face while sitting in a cafe booth. — Image by Tim Gouw from Pixabay

Let me ask you this: Has the notion of a table of contents awakened you in a cold sweat in the middle of the night? Do shifting page breaks frustrate you into reconsidering your life goals? Does image placement make you want to move to a remote mountain village never to be heard from again?

If you’ve answered yes to those questions, you can reconsider that answer just by learning how to apply Word paragraph styles. A clean table of contents doesn’t have to be a mystery and neither do fluid page breaks and images.

Painless Paragraph Styles

The basic concept of paragraph styles is to apply all the fonts AND spacing once so that the changes trickle down to the whole document. THEN, if you decide you want to add more space above or below a paragraph, you just need to make that fix once.

First, create one of your first paragraph styles by formatting any paragraph the way you want it to look. Set your font and font size. Next, go to the Layout tab in the Ribbon, and change the Before and After spacing in the Spacing section.

Create a basic paragraph style in Microsoft Word.

Finally, go back to the Home tab, go to the Styles section, right click over Normal, and select Update Normal to Match Selection. The screencast above doesn’t show the drop-down menu, but it is shown in the image below.

Update the Normal style to make all your paragraphs the same format.

Any paragraph that takes the Normal style now looks like the paragraph you just formatted. If you tweaked the spacing before or after the paragraph, you might see a whole lot of white space between all your paragraphs. That means you probably have extra paragraph breaks. Just click between the paragraph and delete until your cursor lands back at the beginning of the next paragraph.

Just the Beginning of Paragraph Styles

These steps are just the start of what can be done with MS Word paragraph styles, but they are the basic idea if you have been having trouble wrapping your head around a clean, effortless layout.

Once you can grasp this, you can move on to creating heading styles that not only support accessible documents but feed into an automated table of contents as well. You’ll also be able to get page breaks and images to stay where they need to be. That’s all for another day, though.

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Speak Up: The Power of Language

2021-09-29

A woman attempts to speak up using a megaphone — *Speak up!*
Photo by **Andrea Piacquadio** from **Pexels**

I’ve always had a quiet voice. I don’t naturally speak loudly and have to make a conscious effort to speak up.

As a kid making a presentation or asking a question in class, I had to contend with other students in the room being encouraged by the teacher to ask me to “speak up.” However, the teacher did not always instruct my classmates to make the request politely or respectfully.

I wouldn’t have gotten more than two words out when a booming voice of one my peers would interrupt me to demand that I “SPEAK UP!” It was as if they were accusing me of deliberately forcing them to yell at me.

Language is complicated.

A simple juxtaposition like that made up of “speak” and “up” can carry important meaning to the receiver. What other two-word phrases carry such power? Shut up, catch up, get up, keep up. (I’m cherry picking here and deliberately selecting phrases with “up” in them for artistic license.)

The point is that these can come off as rudely demanding phrases even when they are meant to help. “Shut up” is obviously quite rude, but in the appropriate context, the rest of them can be off-putting as well.

On the other hand, I don’t advocate for tiptoeing around the language and living in fear that someone will cancel me if I use a common expression. If I unintentionally upset someone, I should be able to simply apologize — with sincerity, of course—and have that be it.

Language is loud?

As an adult, more things roll off my back and especially as a middle-aged adult. I’m not as bothered by little things anymore, but I still hesitate to make requests that require me to speak up beyond my general level of comfort.

These days I usually find some roundabout way to get someone’s attention. If I can make eye contact, I wait until the other person is within a decent proximity before speaking as loudly while still politely as I can. I usually have to repeat myself.

A man has to speak up when giving an order at a busy lunch counter. — *I like the convenience of lunch counters—no need to flag anyone down.*
Photo by **Elina Sazonova** from **Pexels**

Now that I think about it, I can’t remember the last time anyone actually said “speak up” to me. Have I successfully avoided such a scenario, or are people just more polite? Or is it just kids that are cruel?

Language is communicative.

I recently had a conversation with my neighbor who has no problem speaking up, whether grabbing my attention across the driveway or raising important issues at the monthly HOA meetings.

Speaking of HOA meetings, she has been trying to get me to go to those again. I went once and did not relish the experience of sitting in a hot packed room with a mask on (because pandemic) while trying to pay attention to the echoing voices because the community conference room has terrible acoustics.

An analog clock on a concrete wall — *Tick tock, tick tock.*
Photo by **Shawn Stutzman** from **Pexels**

It’s not hard to speak up there, but it’s hard to comprehend or feign interest in a three-hour meeting about proper tree irrigation and door colors. Yeah, you read that right … three hours!

Anyway, I’d been avoiding talking to her about these meetings, but that day I gathered my courage and managed to speak up about how I didn’t particularly care for the meetings and didn’t see much point. We exchanged arguments politely and went on our merry ways.

Not once did she ask me to speak up. I am thinking about giving the meetings one more chance, though.

Language is powerful!

Speaking up can also be hard when you’re not used to the sound of your own voice. I read recently that our voices sound much richer to ourselves and so that’s why we’re so disappointed when we hear our voices on recordings. It’s just never as good as we think it is.

I have published a couple online courses and am working on a third to hopefully launch in November. It was hard for me to edit the audio of these courses at first. The sound of my own voice was grating. I thought I sounded like a little kid, and it brought back some of those anxious memories.

However, after launching the second course, a freelancing colleague commented that I had a pleasant and clear voice that was easy to listen to. I then played one of the lessons back and heard myself in a new light, er, soundwave.

I guess the power of language can only be acknowledged when one appropriately speaks up.

Subjects Versus Objects: Who Versus Whom

2021-09-01

Head shot of a screech owl with wide open orange eyes — Photo by dgfhfgh ghdgfhg from FreeImages

Do you struggle with the question of when to use who and when to use whom in a sentence? Even seasoned editors find themselves in this conundrum from time to time and need to look things up. (See #9 in my post on copyediting and proofreading skills.)

The solution is not to have some magical instinct for grammar, though. Perhaps the confusion stems from a simple misunderstanding of how these two pesky little pronouns function in a sentence.

Subject Pronouns: I, He, She, They

Let’s start by tackling simpler terms first, like I, he, she, and they. I, he, she, and they are subject pronouns. That means that I, he, she, and they are the ones performing the action in a sentence. They are the subject that does the thing. For example, who went to the cinema in the following sentence?

They went to the cinema to see the new Black Widow movie.

Answer: They went to the cinema. You could put I, He, or She in the same sentence just as easily, and the sentence would be grammatical.

Object Pronouns: Me, Him, Her, Them

And what about me, him, her, and them? These are object pronouns; object pronouns do not perform the action in a sentence but have an action performed to or on them. For example:

The new Black Widow movie gave them nightmares.

In this sentence, you could substitute me, him, or her for them and still get a grammatical sentence. Remember the subject pronouns above? Try putting I, he, she, or they in that sentence, and you’ll end up with something quite ungrammatical:

The new Black Widow movie gave I nightmares.
The new Black Widow movie gave he nightmares.
The new Black Widow movie gave she nightmares.
The new Black Widow movie gave they nightmares.

Compound Pronouns: Me and Him, etc.

Two small owls sit next to each other on a tree branch. — Photo by **Rajukhan Pathan** from **Pex e ls**

Now what about when we are using two pronouns together? What do you think of this sentence:

She and I went to see Black Widow.

What’s the subject? In this case, the subject is two subject pronouns together: She and I. Here’s when some people get confused because they are not sure which pronoun to use.

If you are one of these people, just make the subject singular for a moment. If you remove “She and,” is “I went to see Black Widow” grammatical? … Yep!

What about this sentence:

The new Black Widow movie gave Lucy and me nightmares.

Here we’re using a name, Lucy, plus the object pronoun me that we talked about earlier.

And here’s when even more people get tripped up because they may have learned in school that the pronoun I should go after, never before, someone’s name. That lesson applies only to the subject of a sentence, though, which I talked about in my LinkedIn article “Polite (Mis)Grammar” a while back.

You can see what I mean by using the technique I just introduced: Remove “Lucy,” and you would get “The new Black Widow movie gave me nightmares.”

You can get some more examples of this phenomenon in my more recent LinkedIn article “Her and I?”

Subject Versus Object: Who Versus Whom

Head shot of an owl with a white background reflected — Photo by **AaDil** from **P e xels**

So how does whom come into play? Well, who is a subject pronoun just like I, he, she, and they. What does that make whom then? Well, whom is an object pronoun, just like me, him, her, and them!

(Tip: Most of these object pronouns have the letter m in them, so you can remember that whom is an object pronoun that way.)

For example, in the following sentence, the subject pronoun, who, is used correctly:

Who went to the movies to see Black Widow?

And this sentence uses the object pronoun, whom, correctly:

The Black Widow movie gave whom nightmares?

So, if you continue to struggle with which goes where (that is, who versus whom), equate them with their subject and object counterparts. Can you put I, he, she, and they in the place of who or whom? Can you put me, him, her, and them in the place of who or whom?

See some examples below. The first example is correct, with its incorrect counterpart immediately following.

**Question Using Who:**

Who went to the movies to see Black Widow?

Potential Answers

“I went to the movies to see Black Widow.” versus “Me went to the movies to see Black Widow.”

“He went to the movies to see Black Widow.” versus “Him went to the movies to see Black Widow.”

“She went to the movies to see Black Widow.” versus “Her went to the movies to see Black Widow.”

“They went to the movies to see Black Widow.” versus “Them went to the movies to see Black Widow.”

**Question Using Whom:**

The Black Widow movie gave whom nightmares?

Potential Answers

“The Black Widow movie gave me nightmares.” versus “The Black Widow movie gave I nightmares.”

“The Black Widow movie gave him nightmares.” versus “The Black Widow movie gave he nightmares.”

“The Black Widow movie gave her nightmares.” versus “The Black Widow movie gave she nightmares.”

“The Black Widow movie gave them nightmares.” versus “The Black Widow movie gave they nightmares.”

There you have it. You should now understand more clearly when to use who and when to use whom. If you’d like to learn some more grammar skills, check out my self-paced course “Editing Skills for Clear Writing” on Udemy and LearnDesk.

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