: Re: Why are the paragraphs of a document often indented and not vertically separated? A quick side by side comparison of two layout styles: Left: no indent and with white space; right: indented,

@Annie587

Vote Up Vote Down

I've never heard this style called "academic". I don't know if you just made that phrase up or you heard it somewhere.

But since I was a wee lad in school 40 years ago, I've always been taught that there were two styles for writing a paragraph: "block style", where you put a blank line between paragraphs, and "indent style", where you indent the first line of each paragraph.

Which is better is pretty much a matter of taste. Indent style takes a little less room as it doesn't have all the blank lines, which is good if you want to make what you've written look shorter and bad if you want to make it look longer. I suppose one could argue that indent style eliminates an ambiguity when a paragraph happens to begin on a new a page. Is that a continuation of the paragraph from the preceding page or a new paragraph?

(0)

Login to post a comment!