Tag: How to Paginate Essays in Word

How to Quickly Number Pages for Long Essays in Word

Reading time: 4 minutes

The guidance about page number placement in the Student Supplement for the SBL Handbook of Style is clear enough. How to achieve this placement in Word is anything but.

This process is even a bit more obscure for long essays (15 pages or more) than it is for short ones (14 pages or less). For long essays, the Student Supplement asks that you include a table of contents (§2.7).

Fortunately, once you know how to paginate a short essay, it’s not difficult to tell Word how to properly format your page numbers in the table of contents for a long essay.

1. Introduction

If you don’t already know how to quickly format page numbers in a short essay, you’ll want to read more about that before continuing here.

If you already have your title page and the body of your essay, you can easily go back and insert a table of contents between the two.

But if you haven’t yet started writing the body of your essay, it will help if you have created your title page before following the steps here to create and paginate your table of contents.

2. The Steps

2.1. With an Essay Body

If you already have your title page and at least the first part of your essay body set up for a short essay as I’ve described and you want to insert a new table of contents section,

2.1.1. Go to Home > Paragraph > Show/Hide ¶ to make things a bit easier. Or you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + *.

2.1.2. Place your cursor at the end of your title page immediately before the existing Section Break (Next Page) you already have.

2.1.3. Go to Layout > Breaks > Section Break > Next Page to insert another section break immediately before this one. In this new blank section, you can then add your table of contents now or finish paginating the section first.

2.1.4. Double click into the footer of the first page in your table of contents section.

2.1.5. Insert a page number by going to Page Number > Bottom of Page > Plain Number 2, which should show a preview of a page number in the bottom center of the page.

2.1.6. After you add the page number, highlight and right click it. Then, choose Format Page Numbers.

2.1.7. In the Number Format dropdown box, choose the “i, ii, iii, …” option (i.e., lowercase Roman numerals). Click OK.

2.2. Without an Essay Body

On the other hand, you may want to set up your table of contents section before you start your essay body in the workflow I’ve described.

If so, just follow the steps above for the table of contents immediately after you create your title page (3.1.1).

Then pick up with the rest of the rest of the workflow (3.1.2–3.3). The only change will be that, with step 3.1.2, you’ll place your cursor at the end of the last line of your table of contents rather than your title page.

2.3. Additional Front Matter

In some cases, you might have additional front matter besides just a title page and table of contents (e.g., an abbreviations page; Student Supplement, §2.3).

Other front matter elements don’t need their own sections in Word because they’ll use the same pagination as the table of contents.

In these cases, you’ll simply need to insert a page break after a given front matter element like a table of contents (Layout > Breaks > Page Break). That way, you can start your new front matter element on its own page.

The page break will then allow the page numbering you’ve already set up for that section to apply to the page(s) that the new front matter element occupies.

Conclusion

It can take some getting used to. But knowing how to properly set up page numbers for long essays in Word can save you a great deal of time and frustration figuring it out by trial and error.

How have you normally set up page numbers for tables of contents and other front matter in Word?

Header image provided by Patrick Tomasso

Tired of fighting with Word? Want to be done with frustrated hours fussing over how to get the formatting you need?

My new guide shows you how to bypass all of this so you can let Word work for you while you focus on your research.

Get the Guide

Garrett Thompson (PhD)

For students in any graduate program, mastering the full range of available research tools is crucial for efficient and consistent productivity. Dr. Stark has mastered these tools—the most important of which is Microsoft Word…. Students eager to take their work to the next level would do well to follow Dr. Stark’s in-depth guidance.

How to Quickly Number Pages for Short Essays in Word

Reading time: 4 minutes

The guidance about page number placement in the Student Supplement for the SBL Handbook of Style is clear enough. How to achieve this placement in Word is anything but.

As easy as some things have gotten in Word over the years, this process still isn’t at all intuitive.

Fortunately, it’s also not too difficult once you know how to tell Word how you want your page numbers formatted.

1. Introduction

The trick is to sequence the steps in the proper order. That way, you can eliminate the back and forth trial and error that can make setting up proper page numbers so frustrating.

The process is slightly different for “short” essays (14 pages or less) than it is for “long” essays (15 pages or more; Student Supplement, §2.7).

Here, we’ll assume you’re working on a short essay. And to format a new short essay document to use page numbers properly, you just need to follow a few simple steps.

2. A Word on Word

Before I get to those, though, I should note that I’m also assuming you’re using the most current, fully supported version of Word available via Office 365.1

If you have a different version of Word, you may find some differences also in the precise steps required to format your page numbers.

But any reasonably recent version should allow you to follow along with this process pretty easily.

3. The Steps

3.1. Create your essay’s title page.

3.1.1. Type your title page. If you need a refresher on what the Student Supplement recommends for a title page, you can refer to sample 3.1 on p. 14.2

3.1.2. With your cursor at the end of the last line of your title page, go to Layout > Breaks > Section Break > Next Page.

3.2. Create your essay’s body.

3.2.1. Double click in the header (or top margin) of page 2. Check Different First Page. Uncheck Link to Previous.

3.2.2. Click in the footer of page 2. Uncheck Link to Previous.

3.2.3. Insert a page number by going to Page Number > Bottom of Page > Plain Number 2, which should show a preview of a page number in the bottom center of the page.

3.2.4. After you add the page number, highlight and right click it. Then, choose Format Page Numbers.

3.2.5. Under Page Numbering, choose to Start at 1 rather than to continue from the previous section. Click OK.

3.2.6. Double click back into the main text area of the page numbered 1 (the second page in the total document). Start typing your paper until you have enough text to roll over onto the start of what will be page 2 (the third page in the total document).

3.2.7. Double click into the header of this third page in the total document. Insert a page number by going to Page Number > Top of Page > Plain Number 3, which should show a preview of a page number in the top right of the page.

3.2.8. Double click back into the main text area of the page numbered 2 (the third in the total document). Continue typing the rest of your paper until you get ready to add your bibliography.

3.3. Create your essay’s bibliography.

3.3.1. With your cursor at the end of the last line of text in the body of your paper before your bibliography, go to Layout > Breaks > Section Break > Next Page.

3.3.2. After you create this section break, you should see the page number 1 on the first page of what will become your bibliography. Double click into the footer of this page, highlight the page number, and right click it. Then, choose Format Page Numbers.

3.3.3. Under Page Numbering, choose to Continue from the previous section. Click OK.

3.3.4. Double click back into the main text area of the first page of your bibliography to fill out that section. If your bibliography reaches beyond one page long, you should see that each of the pages in your bibliography after the first one displays the next consecutive page number in the top right.

Conclusion

It can take some getting used to. But learning how to properly set up page numbers for short essays in Word can save you a great deal of time and frustration figuring it out by trial and error.

How have you normally set up short essay page numbers in Word?

Header image provided by Patrick Tomasso

Tired of fighting with Word? Want to be done with frustrated hours fussing over how to get the formatting you need?

My new guide shows you how to bypass all of this so you can let Word work for you while you focus on your research.

Get the Guide

Garrett Thompson (PhD)

For students in any graduate program, mastering the full range of available research tools is crucial for efficient and consistent productivity. Dr. Stark has mastered these tools—the most important of which is Microsoft Word…. Students eager to take their work to the next level would do well to follow Dr. Stark’s in-depth guidance.

  1. As of this writing, this is 16.0.12130.20272. ↩

  2. Word does have a built in feature to insert a title (or “cover”) page. But none of the default versions of this page reflects what the Student Supplement wants very closely. So I find it’s simplest just to create the page yourself. ↩

How Should You Actually Paginate an Essay?

Reading time: 4 minutes

The guidance about page number placement in the Student Supplement for the SBL Handbook of Style is mostly clear. But some of it takes some guesswork.

General Guidance

The Student Supplement gives the following advice for presenting page numbers:1

Overall: Assign each page a number. Arabic numbers are used for the main text of the paper. Roman numerals are used for material prior to the body of the text.

Title page: Do not print the roman numeral “i” on the title page.

Body: On the first page of the main text, place the page number at the bottom center. For subsequent pages, place the page number at the top right corner.

Back matter: On the first page of each appendix and the bibliography, place the page number at the bottom center. For subsequent pages, place the page number at the top right corner.

Then, if you’re writing a “term paper[] of fifteen pages or more,” you’ll also have a “contents page” (Student Supplement §2.7). And for this section, the Student Supplement advises (§2.3),

Contents: The front matter after the title page should be numbered beginning with “ii.” Page numbers should appear without any punctuation marks such as periods or parentheses.2

Placement of Front Matter Page Numbers

Strictly speaking, however, the Student Supplement doesn’t specify a location for Roman numeral page numbers.

Searching for an Answer

This information is also lacking from the SBL Handbook itself and doesn’t appear yet to have been clarified via the SBL Handbook of Style blog.

So for the position of page numbers in Roman numerals, we need to consult Turabian.For a summary of the order in which you should consult authorities for SBL style, see “How to Master SBL Style in 7 Simple Steps.” But when we do so, what we find there is not as direct an answer as we might hope.

Turabian’s Advice

If we line up the Student Supplement’s advice to Turabian, it’s pretty clear that the Student Supplement wants what it calls “term papers” to use a page numbering scheme like Turabian describes as being “traditional[ …] for theses and dissertations.”3

In this scheme, page numbers go “in the footer” on “all front matter pages.”4

But we still don’t have definitive guidance about whether the Roman numeral page numbers go in the bottom center or bottom right, both of which Turabian indicates as options.5 The full Chicago Manual of Style seems likewise silent on this point.

A Guess at an Answer

Pending further clarification about this point from SBL Press, we’re left with some guesswork based on two observations:

  1. Per Turabian’s “traditional[]” scheme, page numbers go “in the footer” on “all front matter pages.”6
  2. The Student Supplement nowhere advises that any page number should go in the bottom right. When the bottom margin has a page number, the number always appears bottom center.

Therefore, the most stylistically consistent placement for page numbers in Roman numerals in front matter is bottom center.

This includes subsequent pages in the same front matter section. Thus, for example, if your table of contents runs into more than one page, its Roman numeral page numbers will always appear bottom center.

Based on what the Student Supplement and Turabian say, this guess seems pretty probable.

But a guess it remains pending further guidance not weighed in here.

Conclusion

Based on these instructions, what you have are either two or three different page numbering statuses (none, Roman, Arabic).

For pages with numbers, you have two different locations (bottom center, top right).

And how you format the page number and where you put it depend on what kind of page it is where that number appears.

How have you normally placed page numbers in your essays?

Header image provided by Patrick Tomasso

  1. I’ve excerpted this material from the Student Supplement §2.3, but I have adapted somewhat for ease of reference and presentation here. ↩

  2. If your paper has an abbreviations section, it will follow the same pagination rules as the contents section. See the Student Supplement §§2.3, 2.7, for more information. ↩

  3. Manual for Writers, 9th ed., §A.1.4.2. ↩

  4. Manual for Writers, 9th ed., §A.1.4.2. ↩

  5. Manual for Writers, 9th ed., §A.1.4.2. ↩

  6. Manual for Writers, 9th ed., §A.1.4.2. ↩