Paragraph Mark Behavior Differences

If you know anything at all about the "inside" workings of Word, you already know that all paragraph-level formatting is stored in the paragraph mark at the end of a paragraph. (The paragraph marks look like a backwards P and they can be viewed by clicking on the tool of the same description on the toolbar.)

It is interesting to note that exactly how Word treats paragraph marks, when editing, depends on several factors. Primarily, it depends on whether the paragraphs contain any text and which version of Word you are using.

Let's say you have two successive paragraphs formatted in Style1 and Style2, respectively. If both paragraphs are blank (there is no text in them), and you delete the first paragraph mark, then the Style1 paragraph is deleted and the Style2 paragraph remains. (It doesn't matter whether you delete the paragraph mark by pressing Delete or Backspace.) This behavior is exactly as you would expect, and works in any version of Word.

If the Style1 paragraph is blank and the Style2 paragraph contain text, when you delete the Style1 paragraph mark the behavior is the same as described above. Again, this is just what you would expect--the first paragraph goes away and the second paragraph remains.

If both paragraphs contain text, the behavior of Word depends on the version you are using. In Word 6 and Word 95, deleting the Style1 paragraph mark runs both paragraphs together, and the resulting paragraph is formatted using Style2. This is as you would expect, since you are deleting the Style1 paragraph mark.

If you are using Word 97 or a later version of Word, the behavior is different. When you delete the Style1 paragraph mark, the paragraphs still run together, but they retain the formatting of the Style1 paragraph. In other words, the formatting of the Style1 paragraph mark is transferred to and replaces the formatting of the Style2 paragraph mark.

It is unclear why Word changed this behavior beginning with Word 97, as the older behavior is actually more logical. The caveat for the user is that you need to keep this behavior in mind as you are editing your documents in later versions of Word.