How to prevent widows and orphans in microsoft word

I vote NO on widow/orphan control, and yes for pretty blocks of text. For my methods as a formatter, I always eliminate orphans/widows because not only is the worry about it archaic, but I honestly donвЂ™t want a book out there formatted in my name that looks awful with that white space.

ItвЂ™s an artistic process, and thus one for the author alone, not the formatter.

It may be a matter of deleting a single word, or adding a couple extra. If youвЂ™re very worried about widows/orphans, the best way to fix the problem is to change the text until the lines fall the way you want them to. That awful white line looks TERRIBLE, whereas a single line ending a page does not. While ending a print page on a paragraph used to be industry standard, all the research IвЂ™ve done on it shows this is no longer the case. Widows and Orphans Yes or No The image above is two screenshots, taken of a formatted print book, set next to each other so you can see what happens when you format a print book in Microsoft Word WITH ORPHANS/WIDOWS/KEEP WITH NEXT activated. To this I say: who cares? Your reader is going to be so into that story that her little eyeballs will be flowing so fast over the text she wonвЂ™t even notice sheвЂ™s switched pages in the middle of a sentence. The school of thought on this stuff is half & half - some people prefer the nasty white space and some people prefer the widows and orphans. Now, the one problem you may think you have when opting to lose the widows/orphans is the fact that not every page will end on a perfect paragraph like the above example. Now check out this picture below WITHOUT the widows/orphans/keep with next activated. Because book designers understand that the way a book LOOKS is just as important as the quality of editing or storyline.

If you open any traditionally published book, you will not see this happening. Ugly, huh? There is a good lineвЂ™s worth of space on the left side that doesnвЂ™t match up with the right hand page. The image above is two screenshots, taken of a formatted print book, set next to each other so you can see what happens when you format a print book in Microsoft Word WITH ORPHANS/WIDOWS/KEEP WITH NEXT activated.

How to prevent widows and orphans in microsoft word