Lecture 5 Technical Writing PDF

Writing Styles Dr. Christina Gamal Lecture 5  Styles Styles are combinations of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text to quickly change its appearance. For example, applying the Heading 1 style might make text bold, Arial, and 16 point, and app...

Writing Styles Dr. Christina Gamal Lecture 5  Styles Styles are combinations of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text to quickly change its appearance. For example, applying the Heading 1 style might make text bold, Arial, and 16 point, and applying the Heading 2 style makes text bold, italic, Arial, and 14 point. Text without formatting  On the ribbon, on the Home tab, there are a number of styles listed. The text is using the Normal style, the first thing is to change the headings so they look different.  You’ve taken the document in to show your boss, and he’s told you the headings need to be red.  With styles, all you’ve to do is tag all the headings to say that they are Heading.  So, to make them red, we just redefine what a Heading 1 is, and they all change.  Select the heading Right click the same box you used to set the style in the first place. Click Modify  Then Change the settings as you require. You can see we made the headings just the way the boss said he wanted them. You can also see a preview of what the result will look like. Click OK  It’s worth some effort from the start to try to only use styles in your documents, so that you can quickly deal with the unexpected later.  Remember that as the body text is also a style, you can change that.  Assume the main text, for whatever reason, needs to be indented, blue, and italic.  Right click the Normal box  But there’s a trap styles cascade.  Most of the default styles are based on the Normal style. By changning the Normal style, which you just did, you change things in other styles as well.  So that’s why the red headings are now indented along with the body text, and also italic.  You can fix by going back and change the settings for Heading 1 style back the way you want them.  Note that anything you already messed with (such as the red) isn’t touched.  We want to change the headings some more anyway, so let’s go and deal with that.  Right-click the Heading 1 style. Click Modify.  The boss wants the headings be inside shaded boxes, so let’s fix the font stuff first, and then go take a look at how to do that.  Instead of clicking OK, click on the Format button. Click Border  Select box border, style, and width of the border Click OK  Click on the shading tab Choose a shadowing color  Choose a border color, and then click OK.  Click OK again.  Benefits of using styles  Styles save time and make your document look good.  Word processor can create documents that look professionally typeset o Heading’s font in contrast with body text. o Paragraphs separated with enough white space. o Elements such as bulleted lists are indented. o Emphasized text is in a contrasting color. o Provides special elements, e.g. table of contents.  Using Direct Formatting  For example, to format headings, you can select the text, apply bold formatting, and then apply a slightly larger font size than the size that you use for the body text.  It’s easy to make mistakes, and you might not get a good looking document.  You must repeat the direct formatting process for each heading.  For subheadings, you must choose smaller size, italicize, and repeat this for each subheading.  Documents formatted by direct formatting are difficult to update.  Using Styles  When you use styles, you can quickly and easily apply a set of formatting choices consistently throughout your document.  A style is a set of formatting characteristics, such as font name, size, color, paragraph alignment and spacing, or even borders and shading.  For example, instead of taking three separate steps to format your heading as 16-point, bold, Cambria, you can achieve the same result in one step by applying the built-in Heading 1 style.  For each heading in your document, you just click in the heading (you don’t even need to select all the text), and then click Heading 1 in the gallery of styles.  Subheading  If you decide that you want subheading, you can use the built-in Heading 2 style, which was designed to look good with the Heading 1 style.  If you later decide that you want headings to have a different look, you can change the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles, and word automatically updates all instances of them in the document.  You can also apply a different Quick style set or a different theme to change the look of headings without making changes to the styles.  Built-in styles  The built-in styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) provide other benefits, too. If you use the built-in heading styles, word can generate a table of contents automatically.  Word also uses the built-in heading styles to make the Document Map, which is a convenient feature for moving through long documents.  Go to view tab, in the Show/Hide group, select the Document Map check box. Click a heading in the document map to jump to the corresponding part of the document (called Navigation Pane in 2010)  An assortment of style types  Character and paragraph styles determine the look of most of the text in a document.  Some styles work as both character and paragraph types, and these styles are known as linked styles.  List styles determine the look of lists.  Table styles determine the look of tables.  Character, paragraph, and linked styles  Character, paragraph, and linked styles appear in the styles group on the Home tab. 1. Paragraph styles are marked with a paragraph symbol: ¶. Click anywhere in a paragraph to apply the style to the entire paragraph. 2. Character styles are marked with a character symbol: a. Click anywhere in a word to apply the style to the entire word. Or you can select more than one word to apply the style to more than one word. 3. Linked styles are marked with both a paragraph symbol and a character symbol: ¶a.  Character styles  Character styles contain formatting characteristics that can be applied to text, such as font name, size, color, bold, italic, underline, borders, and shading.  Character styles do not include formatting that affects paragraph characteristics, such as line spacing, text alignment, indentation, and tab stops.  For example, applying the Emphasis character style formats text as bold, italic, in an accent color.  Character styles  To apply a character style, you select the text that you want to format, and then you click the character style that you want.  When you point to a character style, only the word where you clicked is formatted. When you point to a paragraph style or a linked style, the entire paragraph is formatted. Click the character style that you want to use.  Paragraph styles  A paragraph style includes everything that a character style contains, but it also controls all aspects of a paragraph’s appearance, such as text alignment, tab stops, line spacing, and borders.  Normal and list  Word includes two built-in paragraph styles: Normal and List Paragraph.  By default, word automatically applies the Normal paragraph style to all text in a blank, new document.  Similarly, word automatically applies the list paragraph style to items in a list – for example, when you use the Bullets command to create a bulleted list.  Selecting Paragraphs  To apply a paragraph style, you select the paragraphs that you want to format, and then you click the paragraph style you want.  To select a single paragraph for applying a paragraph style, you can click anywhere in the paragraph.  To select more than one paragraph, click anywhere in the first paragraph and drag to anywhere in the last paragraph that you want to select. You do not need to select the entire paragraph.  Linked styles  A linked style behaves as either a character style or a paragraph style, depending on what you select.  If you click in a paragraph or select a paragraph and then apply a linked style, the style is applied as a paragraph style.  However, if you select a word or phrase in the paragraph and then apply a linked style, the style is applied as a character style, with no effect on the paragraph as a whole.  Run-in-head  You might want the first few words of a paragraph to coordinate with the formatting of the headings in your document.  This type of formatting, known as run-in-head or a side head, is easy to apply by using linked styles.  Select the first few words of a paragraph, and then apply a heading style.  List styles  A list style applies characteristics for formatting a list. A list can include levels of hierarchy, like an outline, that can be indicated by indentation and numbering schemes.  For example, level one in a multilevel list can be aligned against the margin and can begin with Arabic numeral followed by a period.  Level two can be indented slightly from the margin and can begin with a lowercase alphabetical character followed by a closing parenthesis.  Multilevel List  Here is an example of a multilevel list that is two levels deep: 1. This is the first item at level one. a) This is the first item at level two, within the first item at level one. b) This is the second item at level two, within the first item at level one. 2. This is the second item at level one. a) This is the first item at level two, within the second item at level one.  List style  A list style can define formatting for as many as nine levels of a list.  The formatting scheme can include paragraph indentation for each level of the list, any label text(such as, “item” or “chapter”), and the numbering or bullet characters to use in the list.  Unlike the other types of styles (paragraph, character, linked, and table), predefined list styles are not available when you first create a document in word.  A document may contain list styles if you receive it from someone who created his or her own list styles. If your document contains list styles, they are listed under the List styles heading in the gallery of Multilevel lists. To see that gallery, click Multilevel List in the Paragraph group on the Home tab.  List Library  Instead of predefined list styles, word provides several multilevel list templates, which are displayed under the List Library heading in the gallery of multilevel Lists.  These preformatted designs can be applied to lists in your document, and they can also serve as a handy starting point for creating your own list styles.  If you use the built-in heading styles in your document (Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on), you can use multilevel list templets to apply a numbering scheme to your headings. For example, to number headings you click in the first Heading 1 paragraph, and then under List Library you click 1 Heading, 1.1 Heading 2, 1.1.1 Heading 3.  Table Styles  A table provides a consistent look to borders, shading, alignment and fonts in tables.  To apply a table style, you select the table that you want to format, and then click a table style from the gallery of table styles on the Design tab, on the Table Tools contextual tab.  Within a table cell, you can use styles and direct formatting to format the content of the cell. Formatting that you apply this way overrides the formatting that comes from the table style.  In other words, if you use a style or direct formatting to format the content of a table cell and then you switch to a different table style, the content that you formatted with the style or direct formatting is not updated to match the new table style. 1. You can apply formatting to the content of a table, such as changing the header row to blue. 2. When you switch to a different table style, the header row remains blue.  You can change the selection of table styles in gallery by selecting or clearing check boxes in the Table Style Options section on the Design tab, before you open the gallery of table styles.  For example, if your table has no header row, and you don’t want rows to alternate shading, clear the Header Row and Banded Rows check boxes.  When you open the gallery of table styles, you see previews that do not include formatting for header rows or banded rows.  To create a new style 1. Click the arrow in the bottom-right corner of the styles group. 2. The Styles task pane will appear, Select New style.  To create a new style 3. A dialog box will appear. Enter a name for the style, choose the desired text formatting, then click OK.  To create a new style 4. The new style will be applied to the currently selected text. It will also appear in the Styles group.  Styles and themes  Styles and themes are powerful tools in word that can help you easily create professional-looking documents.  A style is a predefined combination of font style, color, and size of text that can be applied to selected text.  A theme is a set of formatting choices that can be applied to an entire document and includes theme colors, fonts, and effects.