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| Theme - Journalism jargons |
One way is to leave a line between two paras. The other, which is more common, is to begin the first sentence a little away from the left margin. That little space, between the margin and the beginning of the first line of a sentence, is called the indent.
The following, a front page article of yesterday’s New York Times, illustrates Indent and Gutter, about which I wrote a couple of days ago.
HANGING INDENT
Here, the first line of the paragraph begins from the left margin, but all the other lines start a little away from the left margin. Basically, here the indent is not for the first line, as normally is the case, instead it is for all the subsequent lines.
This is a design format that used to be very popular in Indian newspapers many years ago. One item on a page used to be set in the ‘hanging indent’ format. For some reasons, now no big newspaper in India, at least to my knowledge, uses this format.
Most word document applications have an option to adjust the indent setting.
(This post is a part of the "Blogging from A to Z Challenge April 2019".)
I'm always interested how authors choose whether or not to apply indentations to their novels in this age of self publishing. Interesting fact about Indian newsprint. Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteHi Darla - What type of indentation and how much should the space be, is a subjective call, depending on how nice it looks in print. So, I guess, it is call that the author takes in consultation with a designer.
DeleteI like hanging indents for notes, but not for writing. Getting kiddos to indent these days... They just don't get it, for some reason. I'm not sure why, especially when it is so easy to set the word processing software to do it automatically.
ReplyDeleteHi Liz - Indent does add a certain amount of neatness to the work. And, you are right, computer will do everything for you automatically!
DeleteInteresting point about the hanging indent - didn't know that. I don't think I've ever seen a hanging indent being used in any newspaper, or for that matter, in any book either.
ReplyDeleteLove all this terminology! Don’t know why it makes me so happy; I guess I must be old school. I’m in the middle of commenting on drafts of student essays, and in almost every one I’m having to remind them to indent those first lines of paragraphs.
ReplyDeleteIsn’t the hanging indent what the MLA system uses for its Works Cited entries?
Keep ’em coming!
Such things we follow without knowing the intension behind the indent.Thank you for the information.
ReplyDelete@ Nilanjana - Ya it is a rare design element nowadays.
ReplyDelete@ Josna - I remember being told to leave some space before beginning a paragraph.
@ Sarala - Thank you.
Learning many new things from your posts.
ReplyDeleteHi Indu - Thank you :-)
ReplyDelete