The first line of each paragraph is un-indented (or “flush left”), whereas each subsequent line is indented a half-inch. Put simply, a hanging indent is the opposite of a standard indent. Get your free sample back in 3 to 6 hours! But there’s another kind of indent, found almost exclusively in academic writing: the hanging indent. My point in all this is that the first-line indent, by virtue of being so ubiquitous, seems quite intuitive and natural. Whatever its origins, this quirk has become firmly entrenched as a convention of online writing. Early programming languages had no standardized command for rendering a tab indent onscreen at the same time, onscreen text was not bound by the size constraints of newsprint, meaning you could insert blank lines with gay abandon without ever having to worry about wasting paper. The reasons for this are rooted in the contrasting technical limitations of online and print media. Rather curiously, online texts like this blog do not generally use an indentation to signal the start of a new paragraph, but rather insert a blank line between paragraphs. You’ve probably done it yourself if you’ve ever kept a diary or hand-written a letter. Now, a simple indent at the start of each paragraph is something you see every day, probably without even noticing, in nearly all printed books, magazines, and newspapers.

In our last look into the mysteries of Microsoft Word, we explored the ruler function, particularly using this tool to automate indentation of text.

How to set hanging indent in word 2010