- Law 14, Signal New Paragraphs Once, Not Twice.
You're probably aware that a paragraph
is a collection of sentences that
all relate to one topic.
Multi-page documents are broken
into paragraphs to chunk the content
and make it easier for your readers to digest.
Using paragraphs also helps break up
really large blocks of text, it makes
your documents more visibly interesting,
and keeps them from looking like
big gray blocks on a page.
So it's important that you give your readers
visual cues or signals when one paragraph
is ending and a new paragraph is beginning.
And you can signal new paragraphs in a couple of ways.
You can indent the first line of a new paragraph,
or you can add some vertical space
on top of the new paragraph.
You want to choose one or the other,
don't use both these signals at the same time.
Indenting the first line of a new paragraph
and adding white space on top of it is redundant.
You're oversignaling to your readers
and your creating awkward, distracting
white space in your documents.
So here's an example of a page
with a few paragraphs on it.
Notice that each new paragraph is indented
and that there's also white space
above each new paragraph.
And here's the same text this time
just with indents that are being
used to signal each new paragraph.
And here again is the same text
this time with vertical white space
added at the top of each paragraph
to signal a new paragraph.
Compare all three of these examples
and notice how clunky this first example looks.
It's just too much, you told me your're
going to start a new paragraph
and then you told me again, I got it.
You don't have to tell me twice.
The white space that you're creating
by this vertical gap plus the indent is awkward.
It's a little distracting, it's a weird shape.
The second two examples show how to
correctly signal new paragraphs.
These pages look much more organized,
they're neater, they're more professional,
overall the page design and the white space
is less distracting.
This problem happens quite a bit
with paragraphs at the start of a new chapter
or at the start of a document.
Here's an example of a paragraph
at the start of a new chapter and you can
see here the paragraph is indented.
And here's the same page this time without the indent.
The second page looks much better.
In the first there's too much extra
unnecessary, awkwardly shaped white space.
As a reader I already know you're
starting a new paragraph, you told me that
when you put the chapter title
at the top of the page and when you added
some space below that title.
You don't need to tell me again.
If you're going to use an indent
to signal a new paragraph,
don't hit the space bar to create the indent.
The best way to create an indent
is to use a first line indent in your software.
How big should a paragraph indent be?
A paragraph indent should be about one to two times
as wide as they type size that you're using.
This is going to give you an indent
that's easily seen but not so big
that it looks awkward.
If you're using 11 point body text
the correct paragraph indent would
be 11 to 22 points wide.
Now if you're going to add vertical white space
instead to signal a new paragraph,
don't create this space by hitting
the return key twice, this results in a space
that is unnecessarily large.
You want to use either the space before
or the space after settings in your paragraph settings
to set the exact amount of space that you want.
So what is that, how big should this space be?
A vertical space equal to about 50 to 80 percent
of the body text is the best size.
If you're using 10 point body text that means
that the vertical space between paragraphs
should be five to eight points tall.
Let's summarize.
When you want to signal the start
of a new paragraph remember that
you only need to use one signal.
Use either a first line indent
or a vertical space, not both.
If a paragraph is at the beginning of a document
or at the beginning of a new chapter
there's no need to use an indent
or add extra white space, the chapter title
or the sub-heading is the signal.
That's law 14.
Signal New Paragraphs Once, Not Twice.