Nuts and Bolts: Inside Verse Considerations * Line Breaks
August 4, 2017
Nuts & Bolts – Inside Verse Considerations * Line Breaks
Continuing from last week’s Nuts & Bolts – Inside Verse Considerations * Alignment
Another important consideration with inside verse alignment is where the line breaks fall. Here are some considerations and tricks for appropriate line breaks.
Line breaks, the point at which two lines of text are split, are ideally at the end of a sentence however this is not always possible and a break can happen mid sentence. It is important for you to manually adjust line breaks so they fall logically within the sentence. You can add these manually with the <enter/return> key or better known as carriage return for us old school typewriter users.
It is best to adjust your line breaks after you have finalized the content of your inside verse as well as finalized the font style and size. After these are final then you should inspect your verse and adjust with manually line breaks if necessary. The main considerations should be maintaining a logical and natural flow of the meaning of the sentence as well as balanced line length.
BALANCED LINE LENGTH
Easy to eyeball lines about the same length.
Not balanced:
Happy Birthday to the
best Mom.
Balanced:
Happy Birthday to the best Mom.
OR
Happy Birthday
to the best Mom.
LOGICAL BREAKS
Often finding the right place to continue a sentence on the following line is where you find a natural pause in the sentence or thought.
Not Natural Breaks:
Natural Breaks:
Here is a good reference and tips for How to Break Lines.
TIP: sometimes it takes reading the verse out loud to yourself to hear where the natural breaks and pauses are
within a sentence. Re-read outloud after manual line breaks to hear if it makes sense and flows naturally.
The difference is made in the details!
Mindy
GCU Community Manager
GCU Community Manager
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GCU Community 
I just read this through with good tips! Thanks! When I looked at the examples, however, the both look the same to me. – Not natural vs. Natural breaks. It looks like you might have used the same example for both. Just mentioning it in case you can change it for us all to see the corrected version. 🙂 Thanks!
Yes, and they might wish to know that last week’s second image doesn’t look correct either.
Thank you, ladies. We have corrected the images on this post and the post from the prior week.
You’re welcome. You might wish to know that there is also an unintended line break in the tip. Gremlins are about! 😉
Thanks for the correction 🙂