What Are Breaks in Text?
Authors, editors and publishers create breaks in the text in order to enhance readability and convey transitions in the writing. Text breaks can be simple white space between blocks of text or can employ more elaborate visual indicators. Whether you are working on a short document of just a few lines or an encyclopedic tome with thousands of pages, properly placed text breaks give your document a polished and professional appearance.
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Line Breaks
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The simplest form of a text break is a line break, which is used most often because a line of text has reached the end of its usable space on a page, and the text must be continued on another line. An author may enter a line break before reaching the end margin to break a line at a fixed point. For example, a line break after "Mary had a little lamb" positions "Its fleece was white as snow" on the next line of the poem.
Paragraph Breaks
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A paragraph break is typically created by hitting the return key twice in order to place a blank line of white space in between paragraphs of text. Other visual cues, such as an indented first line, may also be used as a paragraph break.
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Page Break
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A page break is a fixed indication that a page has ended, and it's commonly used to make a transition from one chapter to the next in a book, or between major sections of a report. A page break is typically an invisible code inserted in word processing programs. Subsequent text is presented on a new page.
Text Breaks
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There are numerous other techniques that authors and editors use to create text breaks to make reading simpler, clearer or merely more aesthetic. A block of text may be offset with a wide variety of techniques including a dashed line, a centered bullet, a wingding ornament or a small image. Text breaks are often used to indicate a transition, such as a change of scene, to introduce a new character or as a means of providing significant but tangential information.
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