Control Text Flow and Pagination

You can control the placement of the automatic page breaks that Word inserts when you fill a page with text.

You can eliminate widows and orphans, keep an entire paragraph on one page, keep one paragraph with the next paragraph on a page, or insert a page break before a paragraph.

1. Select the text whose flow you want to affect.

   

   Note 

   To control widows and orphans, you do not need to select any text.

2. Click Format.

3. Click Paragraph.

   

   The Paragraph dialog box appears.

4. Click the Line and Page Breaks tab.

   This area contains the options you can use to control text flow and automatic pagination.

   

5. Click an option ( changes to ).

6. Click OK to save your changes.

   

   Word groups the selected text in the manner you specified.

What is a widow?

Widow is the term used to describe when the first line of a paragraph appears at the bottom of a page and subsequent lines appear on the following page. Widows are distracting to reading comprehension.

What is an orphan?

Orphan is the term used to describe when the last line of a paragraph appears at the top of a new page and all preceding lines appear at the bottom of the previous page. Like widows, orphans are distracting to reading comprehension.