While almost everyone uses double Enters to separate paragraphs, this is a Bad Thing to do in Word.
Nobody reads the manual for Word, because manuals almost always contain unimportant details, obvious things and legal disclaimers. However, once in a while, there are things that are fundamental yet cannot be understood without having read the manual.
How Word thinks about “paragraphs” and why you should almost never use multiple Enters in Word, is one of these things.
To understand why, we must go back to the age of mechanical typewriters. Back then, the only practical possibility to start a new paragraph was by pulling the carriage lever twice: once to bring the mechanical “carriage” back to the left of the line and move one line below, and once to vertically move the paper an extra line, to introduce extra vertical distance.
On a computer, the Enter key had roughly the same role as the carriage lever. The double-pulling-habit was so deeply ingrained that everyone who migrated to a computer continued the habit, by pressing the Enter-key twice to start a new paragraph. And they then taught their friends, colleagues and children to do the same. And so the habit continued.
The problem with this habit is that after each “real” paragraph it creates an empty paragraph that must be separately managed: you must delete it when it was no longer necessary, and insert a new one when you split or create a new paragraph. Furthermore, the fixed extra line of vertical space is just a bit too much for most people’s taste.
The engineers who designed Word decided that this old habit needed die, and enforced this in two ways.
For example, you will notice that unnecessary empty lines will appear at the top of the page, or instead at the bottom of the page. There are also other problems you’ll encounter in more advanced corners of the software, but we’ll save that for the other videos.
