The next piece from our bulleted list of creating solid manuscript submissions (see the post here) to send to publishers is to put a page break between chapters (and everywhere that you need to start a new page). Fortunately, Microsoft Word makes this easy.
First of all, here’s what not to do. DON’T get to the end of your page or chapter and then do return-return-return-return-return (etc.) until you get to a new page. If you turn on the Show/Hide button, it will look like this. And if you would continue to do those returns until that chapter 2 finally jumps to the next page, then you’re doing it wrong. (Sorry not sorry.)
A key problem is that those returns will stay in place and, if you continue to edit the section above, those returns will then end up wreaking havoc on the rest of your manuscript. Instead, let’s do it the easy way, creating a page break that stays in place, no matter how much material you add or remove above it.
Position your cursor in front of the words that should be moved to a new page (in the case of my example, at the numeral 2). You can do one of two things:
- You can simply push Ctrl + Enter and that will insert a page break.
- OR you can go to the Insert tab and then click on the Page Break button.
Now you have a nice clean break between chapters. To see what this actually looks like, turn on the Show/Hide button again (on the Home tab), then go to the View tab and click on Draft. (You may or may not see that column that I have to the left. That’s a discussion for another day.) Most likely you’ll have just the main page where you’re typing, and you’ll see that there are none of those returns showing up; instead, you can see the clearly marked Page Break.
Now, if you were to go back and remove or add material from above the break, the break will stay in place, always separating that next chapter.
Do this between every chapter and every time that you need to start a new page in your manuscript.
If you need to remove a page break, just position your cursor at the break and push Delete.
Stay tuned next time when we’ll use the Page Break command and get our front matter created!
Linda Taylor: Teacher, Editor, Publishing Professional 