turn off widows and orphans in word 2010

Some of the tricks I used when I was an oilfield technology magazine editor include: How can we slay orphans and widows if they invade our page? Well, think of an orphan as being abandoned early in the child’s life or near the “birth” of a paragraph, whereas a widow is abandoned late in life after the elderly paragraph “husband” dies on the previous page, leaving the widow to carry on all by herself. Widow = last line of a paragraph that gets cut off and stranded at the top of the next page. Orphan = first line of a paragraph that gets cut off and stranded at the bottom of a page. This happens even more frequently when there are multiple columns of text on a page. If you’d like to learn more about how to proofread texts of various kinds, our Becoming A Proofreader course was made for you! Sign up for a free trial today to find out more.Orphans and widows are single lines of text that are separated from the rest of the paragraph to which they belong by a page break, thereby stranding them all alone at the bottom of a page or the top of the next page. If they want you to then tweak the text to remove widows and/or orphans, you can do so. And many word processors even come with in-built features to prevent widows and orphans occurring.īut, if you know your client will be skipping the typesetting process and printing from the draft, you can note any issues with the layout you spot in the document.

When copy editing a document in a word processor, meanwhile, widows, orphans, and runts aren’t usually an issue since the text isn’t set in place. However, you will not need to change them directly. cutting a word or two from a preceding line).

You may even want to leave a comment with a suggestion for fixing it (e.g. When proofreading a typeset text, such as the page proofs for a book, you’ll want to point out widows, orphans, and runts for your client.

Thus, some designers and publishers prefer to avoid them.ĭue to the variation in terminology, moreover, it is always worth checking exactly what your client means if they mention widows, orphans, or runts in the brief for a proofreading job. Runts like these aren’t necessarily problems, but they can look untidy and leave a lot of extra white space on a page. What constitutes a runt also varies, though it can include anything less than half the width of a paragraph.

These lonely words and phrases are also known as runts in some cases. A single word on a new line at the end of a paragraph.

Turn off widows and orphans in word 2010