I have seen many people while they are word processing make popular mistakes that make their document look untidy and unprofessional, this post is going to outline some of these and describe what should be done in order to correct them.

  1. Headings: In my opinion no headings should be underlined, center aligned or in italics, they should always be formatted as right aligned, bold and slightly bigger than the main body text but without manually formatting them unless you are using a word processor that does not have them predifined. Microsoft Office Word has a nifty feature enabling you to quickly select the heading style, saving you time and effort, use it.
  2. Paragraphs: In word processing, anything about paragraphs that your English teacher has told you should be forgotten, except punctuation, of course. Indents is what I am talking about, no paragraphs should be indented- it makes the place look untidy – and there is actually no need for a lump of white space before the text, it just makes the reader have to work harder by moving their eyes across the page.
  3. Alignment: This gets me too, I see a lot of paragraphs or chunks of text that have been left aligned with a border or margin along each side, it looks a hell of a lot better if the paragraph is justified as it then lines up with both sides of the page.
  4. Margins: Try not to over do the margins. As I have stated above, the white space just makes your readers tired and they begin to wonder why they even began to read your article with white space the size of cars.
  5. Fonts: If you see a word processed document with a font list the length the same size as the document you are accessing, don't even start to read it. Who wants to read something where the font changes half way through a sentence to Windings? Don't over use the font feature – stick to one for body and one for heading.
  6. Font Size: Ahh yes, font size, another wonder of the word processing world (if used correctly, of course), just don't make some of your text size 12 and the rest size 16 and don't start off at size 64, the default size of the document when loaded is normally a perfect size for the body of the text (generally set to 10-14).
  7. White Space: I wouldn't advise white space that is inconsistent with the rest of the text either. For example using 2 returns for a new paragraph at the beginning of the document, but in the middle you change to 1. Not good.
  8. Tabs: Many people tend to misunderstand the function of a tab. It is to create columns within the body of a text when a table would look out of place. So don't use the spacebar to space out something from the main text.
  9. Page Breaks: Random page breaks in the middle of a document are a little annoying to the reader – refer to margins to see why – only use them if you think that the paragraph you are currently typing will not fit on the page or you feel you need to create a front page to your document.
  10. Table of Contents: Many word processing applications have a little feature which uses the headings within a document to create a table of contents, so there is no need to manually type one.
  11. Punctuation: I have to admit, this is one of the mistakes I do all the time. I seem to over do the punctuation with commas and hyphens, but at the same time not using enough periods. Try not to do this, if it is possible.
  12. Spellchecker: Spellcheckers are your friends, use them. It really helps to use the spellchecker to check your work while you are typing.

Maybe this will help a few people to sort out their own word processing habits.