A well-written essay is a good thing. But a perfect essay needs more than just good writing. It also needs to be professionally formatted. And to do this, you’ll need to master text alignment in Microsoft Word. Herein, we explain what you need to know.
Setting text alignment is simple. All you need to do is go to the ‘Paragraph’ section of the ‘Home’ tab on the main ribbon in Microsoft Word. Here, you’ll find a set of four options in the bottom left corner (represented by four horizontal lines in various arrangements).
These are the basic text alignment options. From left to right, they are:
For essays, ‘Justify’ is often the best choice, as it presents text in neat blocks. However, some people prefer Align Left in order to avoid ‘rivers’ (i.e. vertical lines of empty space).
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‘Align Right’ is fairly unusual, but it can be used to set captions at the right-hand side of an image. ‘Center’, meanwhile, is useful for headings and some short examples, but it isn’t usually used with larger blocks of text. For that, you’ll need to use Microsoft Word’s indentation options.
If you need to type elsewhere on the page, you can use a text box. These work like images (i.e. you can set other text to ‘wrap’ around the box, so anything you type there will be separate from the rest of your work). To add a text box to a document:
Adding a text box.
You can then type in the box (look out for text disappearing if you type more than fits within the margins; you can increase the size of the box if this happens). In addition, you can change the style of the text box (or add other elements) via the ‘Format’ menu while the box is selected.
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