[stylist] Word 2007: Some Things I Learned From Writing Poetry

[Homme, James]

Hi People,
This is how to fix two issues that you can have with writing poetry if you do it in Word 2007. The first is the difference between line breaks and paragraph breaks and what that can do to the reading of your poetry, and how to deal with it. The second is how to keep Word from putting in unintended capital letters at the beginnings of the lines of your poetry.

The difference between a line break and a paragraph break. In Word, to create a line break, it is often said that you hit Return, and that to create a paragraph break, you hit Return twice. That isn't true. To get a real line break, you hit Shift + Return. To get a real paragraph break, you hit Return. This includes the paragraph break after such things as heading styles. Word takes care of what happens visually between paragraphs, even though it doesn't register with your screen reader. If this doesn't happen, then you should get someone sighted to help you alter paragraph styles, usually a Normal or Body style or a Heading style, so that it does what it should, visually.

This is significant when you are doing poetry. Why? Because in your poem, a line of the poem can end with a line break, while a stanza can end as a paragraph break. When you use a screen reader, you can then read a line by pressing plain old Down or Up arrow. You can read an entire stanza by using Control + Down or Control + Up arrow. If you use true line breaks in your poetry, you can also use the sentence reading keys to read sentences in your poems, even if they span multiple lines within a stanza. Reading sentences can help you listen to a whole thought without having to paste things together in your brain. If you use paragraph breaks instead of line breaks within the stanzas of your poetry, this forces the sentence reading keys to stop at every line of your poem. This is probably what you want to avoid.

In Word 2007, to make Word avoid putting unintended capital letters at the beginnings of your lines, just do this.

* Hit Alt + F, Followed by the letter I. This opens up Word Options.
* Arrow down until you hear Proofing, then press Alt + A for Autocorrect Options.
* Hit Shift + Tab until you hear a check box about capitalizing letters at the beginnings of sentences. Turn that off.
* Go to the Close button and press it, then press OK until you are back to your masterpiece.
* No more unintended capital letters at the beginnings of your poetry lines.

The only down side to this approach is that you will need to make sure that you capitalize every letter of your own sentences, which I think you'd probably do anyway, so no big deal, right?

That's it for now.

Thanks.

Jim

Jim Homme,
Usability Services,
Phone: 412-544-1810.


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