breaking bad

 

 

Breaking Bad

 

“We’re all on the same page.”

― Jesse Brinkman in Breaking Bad

 

 Watch how headings, tables, and paragraphs
break from one page to the next.

 

“Breaks” refer to the break from one page to the next. A bad break is when something gets left behind on one page that really should be on the next page. The worst bad break is when a header is left behind:


 "Expert Panel Assessment" is the header for the next paragraph, but the header is on the previous page, separated from the text. What you want is:

Which I achieved (in this real-world example in a proposal I am working on at the moment) by adding lines before "Expert Panel Assessment" until the header jumped to the next page.

You should also look for cases where one sentence of a paragraph is on one page with the rest on the next page. Better to shift the entirety of that sentence to the next page. More visually appealing but, more importantly, better for your reader who will not have to pause mid-sentence to turn the page.

For example, do this:

not this:

In this case, it's two sentences. In fact, Word in this case won't allow a single-sentence to remain on the bad side of a break.

If you know how to set up styles in Word, you can set up your headers to automatically “keep with next” to avoid bad breaks. If you are a heathen like me when it comes to styles, then you have to watch for these bad breaks. In general, it’s always a good idea to enter full page view of a final report or paper once you are completely finished with everything and then page through each page making sure the layout looks good and that you don’t have any bad breaks.

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