You can modify line and paragraph spacing by clicking this tiny checkbox under home tab –> “paragraph”. So if you have to choose between modifying line or paragraph spacing, do line spacing first. In my opinion folks will notice shrunken paragraph spacing but not shrunken line spacing. Maintaining white space in your grant is crucial to improve its readability, so don’t squeeze it too much.
(In contrast, Courier is a monospaced font and every character is exactly the same width.) Adjust line and paragraph spacingīoth line and paragraph spacing affect the amount of white space on your page. You might need to sample a few inches to get a better idea of whether you or not are under the 15 character limit.
FYI: all NIH-approved fonts are proportional fonts so narrow characters like lowercase L (“l”) take up less width than an uppercase W, and a random sample of text that happens to have a lot of narrow letters might have more than 15 characters/linear inch. If you increase to a number larger than 0.1, it might start looking weird, so don’t push it to far.Ī word of advice with this feature: If you are too aggressive, you might run amok with NIH guidelines, which specify 15 characters per linear inch, so double check the character count in an inch (view –> ruler will allow you to manually check). I can’t tell the difference in the letter spacing before and after using 0.1. This change will give you a few lines back in a 4 page document. Highlight your text then home –> font little arrow –> advanced –> spacing becomes condensed then change the selecter menu to 0.1 pt. You can shrink the space between your letters without actually changing the font size/size of the letters. In the ipsum lorem document, justified Georgia was a couple of lines shorter than any other combinations of aligned-left/justification and NIH-approved fonts in Windows. But, try combining different fonts with justification. It’s pre-installed on Mac.) There were not major differences in length in my aligned-left ipsum lorem document between any of the fonts when the lines were aligned-left. (Note: Helvetica doesn’t come pre-installed on Windows. The NIH guidelines specify size 11 Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, and Palatino Linotype fonts as acceptable options. Modifying your size 11 font Try Georgia, Palatino Linotype, or Helvetica fonts instead of Arial You can try combining hyphenation and justification, though I’m not sure it will gain anything. If you are going to use justification, please remember to apply it to the entirety of the text and not just a subset of paragraphs for the same reason that you don’t wear a tie with a polo shirt. I have colleagues who really like justification because it looks more orderly on a page. Personally, I like ragged lines (“align left”) and not justified lines because I find justified text harder to read. Here is the button to turn on justification. (Also, try combining justification with different fonts, see below.) It’s worked to shorten some prior grants, so it’s worth giving a try. In my 4 page ipsum lorem document, the length didn’t change.
Sometimes it shortens a lot, sometimes it stays the same, sometimes it’s a smidge longer. Justification’s effect on length is unpredictable. Justification makes words reach from the left to rightmost extremes of the margin, stretching or compressing the width of the spacing between words to make it fit. Hyphenation will get you a few lines in a 4 page document. Hyphenation breaks longer words across lines with a hyphen in the style commonly used in novels. I only just learned about hyphens from Jason Buxbaum in this tweet. I made up a 4 page ‘ipsum lorem’ document for this so I can give actual quantifications of what this does to document length. This also assumes that you are already using narrow margins. This post is focused on NIH grant formatting but details here are relevant for most grants. It turns out that there are some built-in settings in MS Word to help you get below the length limit without removing additional text. You’ve toiled on your grant day in and out for weeks on end, and despite chopping out loads of overly verbose text, it’s still over the length.