That being said, all of my examples use Word’s default margins of Top/Bottom – 1” and Left/Right = 1.25 inch because I like the extra white space. The last thing you need to know about before I give you “the 25 line secret” is that margins and font size – even font type – matter when you are trying to get your manuscript formatted to have 25 lines on a page. (Obviously no one polled us writers when they were deciding which features made the cut in Word.)Īre you catching on yet that Paragraph is a veritable party for us writers? I have people tell me all the time that they can’t find this sucker – it is located on the second tab in the dialog box, titled “Line and Page Breaks.” The default setting in Word is that the “Widow/Orphan control” is set to ON. Paragraph is also home to that pesky “Widow/Orphan control.” This feature is what makes all the lines in a paragraph stay together, even when you want them to separate to help you get 25 lines on a page. While in this dialog box, you can choose the Indent setting of “First line” and indent the first line of each paragraph in your manuscript (the most common setting is. [Of course, you can also set line spacing with key strokes:
It wasn’t until Word 2007 that there was a button on the Ribbon for this. This is where most people have traditionally gone to set Line Spacing to single, double or 1 ½ space. There is so much to do here! All you have to do is select the text you’d like to change (hit Ctrl + A on your keyboard to select the entire document) and go to the Format Paragraph dialog box. I mean, the Paragraph dialog box is one of my favorite places in Word. I was very excited about this whole blog topic as a learning exercise. Times New Roman, for example, makes me crazy because when there is an “r” and an “n” next to each other, to me they look like an “m.” I secretly believe that if my manuscript is in an easy-to-read font like Arial or Tahoma, the editor (that poor soul who reads thousands of pages a week) will be more kindly disposed to buy my book.
Why had I never done this before, you ask? Mostly because I’m half blind. I’ve been writing for nearly a decade and teaching computer classes for longer than that. I thought, I’ve been teaching Word since version 2.0, I can do a pesky Paragraph setting.
When someone in my writing chapter asked me if I could “please, please, please write a blog about how to get 25 lines per page,” I responded “of course I will” even though I’d never done this setting in my life.