Diane,

I'm about to give you more information on writing song lyrics/poetry in 
Word than you ever wanted to know.

when writing poetry or song lyrics, the convention is to indent the 
words that don't fit on the first line (hanging indents). If there are 
lots of these in a single poem/song, you can often avoid them by 
changing the font. When I type information out for my students, I 
normally use Courier New 12-pt, which gets about 65 characters to the 
line. If I am writing out a poem with lots of long lines, I change the 
font to times New Roman 12-pt, which gets about 100 characters to a line 
and creates very few hanging indents. People read both fonts 
comfortably, so nothing is lost.

If I decide to go with hanging indents anyway, I type the poem, pressing 
enter at the end of each line. When I'm done, I use ctrl+a to select 
all, then ctrl+t to make all lines/paragraphs hang. This obviously only 
affects the lines of poetry that are longer than the lines of the page.

I'm not sure what the convention is in song lyrics, but in poetry, you 
don't center the title. Instead, you  leave it at the left margin 
because most of the body of the poem doesn't actually extend to the 
right margin.

If you press enter at the end of a line in Word, even if you don't end 
that line with a period or other end stop punctuation, Word capitalizes 
the first letter of the next line/paragraph. This is fine in song 
lyrics, but it isn't always fine in poetry, especially in contemporary 
poetry, and you may not want it in other types of lists. I think there's 
a setting in Files>Options to fix this, but in older versions of Word, 
the setting isn't necessarily honored. You can make Word keep the first 
letter of the line in lower case by doing one of two things:

* After you hit enter at the end of the line, type the next line. Before 
pressing enter at the end of the second line, check the first letter of 
the second line to find out whether it's in upper or lower case. If it's 
in upper case, correct it. then go back to the end of the line and press 
enter. You may have to do this again one or two more times before Word 
understands that you don't want the first letters of lines to be 
capitalized. If later you happen to start a line with a capital letter, 
you have to do this again to let Word know you don't want to start a 
pattern. This works in Word 2010 and maybe 2007, but not in Word 2003.

* Press shift+enter at the end of the line. This makes a soft line 
break, leaving the first letter of the next poetic line in lower case. 
If you're a Jaws user, you need to hit the spacebar before shift+enter; 
otherwise, Jaws reads the last word of one line and the first word of 
the next as if they were all together. Since shift+enter is a soft line 
break, Word and your screen reader think the block of text is a single 
paragraph, so you can't read the lyrics line by line with ctrl+down-arrow.

Hope this is more helpful than confusing.

Ciao


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