If you’d like to learn more about how to proofread texts of various kinds, our Becoming A Proofreader course was made for you! Sign up for a free trial today to find out more. If they want you to then tweak the text to remove widows and/or orphans, you can do so. And many word processors even come with in-built features to prevent widows and orphans occurring.īut, if you know your client will be skipping the typesetting process and printing from the draft, you can note any issues with the layout you spot in the document. When copy editing a document in a word processor, meanwhile, widows, orphans, and runts aren’t usually an issue since the text isn’t set in place. However, you will not need to change them directly. Like a widow, an orphan is a single word, part of a word or very short line, except it appears at the beginning of a column or a page.
You may even want to leave a comment with a suggestion for fixing it (e.g., cutting a word or two from a preceding line). It can be library-dependent or -agnostic. Widows and Orphans A widow is a very short line usually one word, or the end of a hyphenated word at the end of a paragraph or column. An orphan is a similar unwanted straggler, but this describes a word that at the top of a page. When proofreading a typeset text, such as the page proofs for a book, you’ll want to point out widows, orphans, and runts for your client. Sitename descriptionA widow is a lone word that appears at the bottom of a paragraph or page. Thus, some designers and publishers prefer to avoid them.ĭue to the variation in terminology, moreover, it is always worth checking exactly what your client means if they mention widows, orphans, or runts in the brief for a proofreading job. Widows are single last lines stranded at the top of a column.) That’s why I (Blatner) like the term runt when talking about short last-lines in a paragraph. (Orphans are single first lines stranded at the bottom of a column. Runts like these aren’t necessarily problems, but they can look untidy and leave a lot of extra white space on a page. The terms Orphans and Widows are reserved for other typographic problems. So what is a widow in typography Widows and orphans can be avoided in one of two ways, either by moving the abandoned line to the other page with the. What constitutes a runt also varies, though it can include anything less than half the width of a paragraph. These lonely words and phrases are also known as runts in some cases. A single word on a new line at the end of a paragraph.