Indents, margins, and spacing Leave one-inch margins on the sides and top and bottom of your text; do not justify the content. Each paragraph's first line should be indented one-half inch (or five to seven spaces) from the left margin. The American Psychological Association advises two spaces following end-of-sentence punctuation. Indentation allows you to organize your thoughts and maintain your writing flow. Without indentation, everything would be crammed together with no room for anything else! Indenting also helps make your text more readable and accessible because it gives readers some space between sentences and paragraphs. When typing, use Shift+Tab to move through indent levels. You can also select several lines of text and then press Ctrl+K followed by Ctrl+D to achieve the same result as indenting an entire document. Indenting a paragraph means adding space above and below the paragraph mark. This is different from running a sentence off the right edge of the page or leaving a space at the end of a line. Paragraphs should be indented only around keywords or ideas that require further expansion or development of the sentence or paragraph. In general, try to avoid indenting too much. If you need to indent multiple paragraphs under 10 lines in length, that's fine but if they're all indented together, the reader may experience difficulty navigating between ideas. Longer paragraphs should be broken into several shorter ones to keep the reading flow uninterrupted.