

Once you have finished writing your essay or research paper, proofread it carefully. This helps to make the text more organized and professional-looking. Therefore, use the same font, font size, spacing, and indentation style throughout the document. They may have specific requirements regarding indentation style or font size that you need to follow.īest Practices for Indenting Paragraphs in Essays or Research PapersĪs mentioned earlier, consistency is key when formatting an essay or research paper. Therefore, it is essential to check the formatting guidelines of your instructor or professor before submitting your paper.

Some styles already have shortcut keys to apply the style, but you can also use the Modify Styles dialog to add you own. Word's built-in styles don't include this inheritance feature by default, but styles can easily be modified to include it. All subsequent paragraphs will continue to have first-line indents until you apply a different style. When you have finished that paragraph, pressing Enter will automatically apply the Body Text First Indent style. When you press Enter at the end of the heading content, Word will automatically apply the Body Text style to the following paragraph. This way, when you type the Heading 2 content you can apply the style using the built-in shortcut key Ctrl-Alt-2. This approach is easiest to implement (and understand) if you use Word's built-in styles: a Heading 2 style would use Body Text as the "Style for following paragraph" the Body Text style would have Body Text First Indent as the "Style for following paragraph" and the Body Text First Indent style would have Body Text First Indent as the "Style for following paragraph". For your indented paragraph, that setting can be left as the default to continue using the same style.

Then, in that style, specify the style name for the indented paragraph that follows it. Modify the style used for your section heading to specify the style name you want for the paragraph following it (the Style for following paragraph setting in the Modify Style dialog).
