There may be elements that are new or not new for you within this course. So I'll try to cover all of them based on experience that I've had working with writers at all levels of the game from first time, newly published authors, to professionals who have been writing for decades. In fact, I'll try not to make any assumptions. And hopefully you'll play along because you may find that in each of these sections, there's one little tip or trick that you can use to really turn the game around for yourself. Now, for those of you who were raised in the typewriter era, we were taught on that manual typewriter. At the end of a line of type, we needed to hit that carriage return to bring the typewriter back so that it could begin at the left hand line on the next one.

However, using modern word processors, we no longer need to press enter at the end of a line. So if here, I'll make A live line of pipe. I'm American. So I'll just create something that I know by heart, pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And I'm going to keep typing when I get to the end of the line, and to the republic for which it and here I'm getting to the end of the line on that old typewriter, I would have needed to use the carriage return. But however, if I just now keep typing, notice how it automatically wraps around to a new line.

I not only encourage you to allow this to happen, but I command you to allow this to happen. Because if you go through your document, and place hard returns, oops, excuse me by having your line of type followed by an Enter key or return key at the end of every line like I'm demonstrating here, below. What will happen when you are eventually ready to turn your file into a book is that we are going to need to change the dimensions of the page of your book. And I'll run through this very quickly now, but I'll show it in detail later. Imagine that all of a sudden, the line changes that you have applied here will no longer fit when we change the dimensions of the page that the book is aiming for. Do you see how what used to fit on one line now takes up one and three quarters of a line and it splits up the sentence in the middle of a phrase, this is not going to be beneficial to you at all.

So instead, we're going to allow that line wrap to happen. Now, here is an important button called undo that I am going to take the opportunity to show you about if you have just made some snafu to a document that you have no Idea perhaps even what you did that made this occur, the undo button is absolutely your friend. It can be added to your easy toolbar. If it's not already there. Undo and Redo I believe are part of the factory settings though by default. Anyway, once you have done something in a document, this Undo button will light up.

It looks like an arrow that flips over to the left. And we're going to click Undo it will undo the last thing that we did. And at that point, then the redo button becomes available next door to it, an arrow flipping over to the right, allowing us to remake that change that we just undid. Do you notice the power of undo is multiplied double so it can take you back one step at a time through each of the changes you made. So as I added those hard returns in now when I click Undo each time Notice how it puts it back to the way that I had it before where the line wrap was allowed to wrap around at the end of each line without any hard carriage returns in there. Okay, that's first and foremost, allow the word wrap to take place an only user enter key.

When you're ready to make a new paragraph. We'll talk in a next section about the line spacing and things like this because you may be disturbed as a fiction writer to have space being added between the paragraphs and to not have lines indented here, but I promise we'll clear that up in the next section. For the moment, let's focus on the word wrap. And the space between sentences because if like me, you were brought up in that typewriter era, we were trained to place two spaces between sentences. The whenever we had the closing punctuation, we were trained to go space space and then begin our new sentence. Instead, the modern publishing era uses just one space between sentences.

And I'll teach you in the find replace section of this course how to go back and remove that second space between all of your sentences without needing to go entry by entry through your entire document. Instead, we'll be able to do it in a matter of seconds. I'll show you that in the Find and Replace feature, just in case you're curious and want to jump ahead now, the last thing I want to show you in this basic entry level is the zoom feature. Many of my author friends will write in a large font size because their eyes are going or they don't want to use their reading glasses while they're writing because it gives them a headache. Here is another option to allow you to keep your document in the standard type size to start with. Look to the lower right hand corner of your screen and you You're gonna see a zooming toolbar here with a minus on one end of the scale, a sliding bar in the middle, and a plus on the other end of the scale and then a percentage base.

So when you first open the computer, it's probably going to be set to 100%. You can either grab that sliding bar and click and drag outward. Or you can click the plus or the minus size to zoom in on your screen and make it fit the width of your screen so that you can then see your print. without needing to make changes to the size. This will be very important. Once you get to the later pieces of the edit and format especially we don't want to change the font size because it will change the pagination of your book.

So using this zoom feature can be super helpful so that you can see your words and they can have as much power for you as they're going to eventually have for your writer.