From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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14 Signal new paragraphs once, not twice

14 Signal new paragraphs once, not twice

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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14 Signal new paragraphs once, not twice

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- Law 14, Signal New Paragraphs Once, Not Twice. You're probably aware that a paragraph is a collection of sentences that all relate to one topic. Multi-page documents are broken into paragraphs to chunk the content and make it easier for your readers to digest. Using paragraphs also helps break up really large blocks of text, it makes your documents more visibly interesting, and keeps them from looking like big gray blocks on a page. So it's important that you give your readers visual cues or signals when one paragraph is ending and a new paragraph is beginning. And you can signal new paragraphs in a couple of ways. You can indent the first line of a new paragraph, or you can add some vertical space on top of the new paragraph. You want to choose one or the other, don't use both these signals at the same time. Indenting the first line of a new paragraph and adding white space on top of it is redundant. You're oversignaling to your readers and your creating awkward, distracting white…

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