LibAnswers: Student Digital Skills and Assistive Technology

The Sort by Paragraph function works with standard paragraphs, which have preset natural spacing before and after them. If you manually add a blank line between entries by pressing rnter on the keyboard, the function will sort these 'blank' lines as well. Since the style of the references is single-lined with no added spacing, the function will sort everything as single lines.

To prevent this, avoid pressing rnter on the keyboard after each reference entry to add a return, and instead, use 'styles' to add natural spacing between individual reference units.

Alphabetize your References in Word by using Sort by Paragraph and Styles.

To start, identify where the returns are by clicking on the Paragraph Marker button (via the Home tab)

The next step is to add the 'natural' spacing before and after the references using the Styles panel in the Home tab.

As you can see from the image below, the paragraphs have a few points (pts) of natural spacing between the paragraphs (and after the paragraph markers); whereas the References have a return between them to create the spacing. 

You can see what Word identify as the style of a selected item on your page and note what is highlighted in the styles panel. You can then right-click on the style to Modify it.

Try selecting one of your references, and then right-click on the highlighted style in the Styles Panel (you will see a grey border around it) and select Modify.

Then, in the Modify Style window, select Paragraph from the Format drop-down. 

In the new Paragraph window, change the spacing from zero to 6 pts before and after and leave line spacing as a single. Click ok to close both the Paragraph window and the Modify Style window.

• You should now see all of your references with the 6 pts spacing (see a screenshot of the example below). If you have already alphabetized them, they should now appear in the correct order but with natural spacing added. 

3. If you have not sorted them yet, select all the references and then click on the Sort icon in the Home tab.