WIDOWS AND ORPHANS
Does your word processor pull sentences from the bottom of one page and place them at the top of the next page? If so, you have the widows and orphans function turned on.
To Eliminate WIDOWS AND ORPHANS:
ORPHANS:
Turning off Widows and Orphans does not mean that it’s OK to have a partial sentence all alone on the last page of a paper. Here are some suggestions for solving that problem:
1. Do a little more editing. Certainly, you could eliminate a couple of words either in that paragraph or in a paragraph or more in the entire paper. Look for any paragraph that has just a few words on the last line. It could take just a small adjustment anywhere in such a paragraph to pull those last few words of that paragraph up, which would also pull the orphan off of that last page.
2. Or cheat a little on the side margins, top and bottom margins or all four. After all, who is going to notice the difference between a .9” margin and a 1” margin? If you examine margins from a variety of papers where students have all set their margins at 1” all around, you will find some slight differences, possibly attributable to differences in printers.
For further information, read "Typography Concepts: Widows and Orphans" written by J. Edward Casteele, published on <BrightHub.com>. To access, click here.
- In "Home" or "Page Layout" or "Format" you will find the Paragraph option.
- In the Paragraph box, click on the button that will show you a larger box of options. (Lower right-hand corner)
- You should get a box that has two categories at the top: Click on "Line and Page Breaks."
- Under the "Pagination" options, you will see a box for "Widow/Orphan control." Uncheck that box.
- At the bottom of the "Paragraph" box, second from the left, you will find a "Set As Default" button. Click on that.
- Then select "OK."
- A widow is the name of a line that begins a new paragraph at the bottom of a page. When the widows and orphans function is on, your word processor will automatically pull that last sentence of the page (which is the first sentence of a paragraph) onto the next page, thereby making your bottom margin extra large.
ORPHANS:
- When the orphan function is on, your word processor will automatically correct for a partial sentence that ends up all alone on a page. Since that is visually unappealing, the word processor pulls a line or so of print from the previous page, thereby again making that bottom margin on the previous page too large.
Turning off Widows and Orphans does not mean that it’s OK to have a partial sentence all alone on the last page of a paper. Here are some suggestions for solving that problem:
1. Do a little more editing. Certainly, you could eliminate a couple of words either in that paragraph or in a paragraph or more in the entire paper. Look for any paragraph that has just a few words on the last line. It could take just a small adjustment anywhere in such a paragraph to pull those last few words of that paragraph up, which would also pull the orphan off of that last page.
2. Or cheat a little on the side margins, top and bottom margins or all four. After all, who is going to notice the difference between a .9” margin and a 1” margin? If you examine margins from a variety of papers where students have all set their margins at 1” all around, you will find some slight differences, possibly attributable to differences in printers.
For further information, read "Typography Concepts: Widows and Orphans" written by J. Edward Casteele, published on <BrightHub.com>. To access, click here.