Hanging Indents (ugh!)

In response to a question on hanging indents  in a recent APA Workshop, this is  how to insert them into a MS Office Word document. Hanging indents are useful for formatting a reference list.

If you are working on a PC using MS Office Word 2007 it’s relatively easy. Select the text you want to apply a hanging indent to. Then, under the home tab move right to the paragraph section and click the small square on the bottom right corner. This will activate the paragraph window, now go to “special” and from the pull-down menu select “hanging.”

It’s really important not to use hard returns at the end of each line in your reference list, this tends to trick Word into thinking each line is a paragraph, and the result is that the hanging indent feature doesn’t seem to work. If this is the case use the show/hide paragraph feature (Ctrl+*) to identify offending hard returns and delete them.

Mac users can activate the paragraph pop-up window by going to format > paragraph > or use these keystrokes “option+apple key+m” next go to “special” and select “hanging.” This works for both MS Office Word for Mac 2004 and 2008.

For those of you who were unable to attend APA workshops this semester here are some useful delicious citation links. Remember you are expected to use APA at Bank Street for all assignments and independent masters projects.