Wattpad 101: Your guide to the world of Wattpad

Fixing Format Foibles

Where ever copy and pasting is involved, you're opening yourself up to a world of pain. You'll see strange spacing issues, random tabs, and crap that won't work no matter what the heck you do. Word, Wattpad, and whatever other text editor you like to use don't always work hand in hand. So how do you go about fixing these issues? Here are a couple offers of advice to help fix some of the more common problems.

Some of this stuff might be worth doing even without the need to fix a format, just on principal.

Clear all Formatting and Start From Scratch

So the editing is on the fritz and you just can't get things to work the way you want them to. The simplest way to fix this is to clear formatting. Ctrl+A or "select all" under home/editing will select all of the text for you. After that, under home/font, at least in Microsoft word 2013/2016... has a clear format option. It looks like an eraser. Just google it, most word editors should have one.

So that's part of what you have to do. Here's the second part.

1) Select all of the text.

2) Change all of the fonts to the font of choice and size of choice.

3) Right click while it's selected, and go to paragraph.

4) Back sure text is aligned to the left (this is in home/paragraph)

5) Line spacing should be single or 1.5. (Unless it calls for double spaced)

6) The Before and After spacing are the spacing between paragraphs. This is the biggest difference you probably see. 6 pts is usually the minimum (either before or after or both). Decide where you want your spacing to be, in 95% of cases, whether it's before or after won't matter, it'll look the same. 6 pts would look normal, but you can bring it up to 12 without things looking too weird.

Anyway, those six steps would fix a large amount of errors, such as when you see all of your paragraphs crumbled up as a block of text.

How You Paste Matters

Of course, how you paste also matters to how it looks. Back in the day, you used to have only one form of pasting. Nowadays, you can paste in many different formats. Once copying some text, right click to paste, and you'll see more than one option. You can go to advanced and see all the different ways to paste. Keep text only, paste with source formatting, merge formatting... Text out which paste option gives you the results you desire. You may find that you don't need to clear any formatting if you pasted it correctly in the first place.

Replace The Mistakes

Do not underestimate the use of the Replace function. It is seriously important when doing editing, and I think too many people do far more work than they need to because they never thing to use it. Here are a few simple mistakes that could quickly be fixed with the repair.

1) Replace ". " with ". " Yes, those are different. Two spaces after a period with one. (Or one with two if that happens to be your writing style. If your work has no decimals, you could also replace "." With ". " and then replaced ". " with ". ". Do you see what I just did there? I removed all of the instances in which you forgot to put a space after your period. The second replace fixes the double spaces you create from doing the first fix.

2) Replace "^p^p" with "^p". If someone is experiencing the format issues in which their paragraphs aren't being separated, they can fix it by the suggestion given in six above. However, many people don't do that. They just hit "enter" twice, effectively making two soft returns. This looks fine... Until you try to paste it into word or open it up in a word document that doesn't have this error. Then you look bad. This quickly fixes the "soft returns" and puts them back to how they're supposed to be.