Line breaks are shown by the icon of an arrow pointing left and down when format markings are enabled (shown right). What is a line break? Followings will show you…
Definition Of A Line Break
- In poetry, a line break is a literary device that is used to separate one line from the next. It can be used without using standard punctuation. It can also be thought of as the split point of a line into two parts. Enjambment can occasionally be produced by a line break in the middle of a clause.
- The broken lines divide the poem into lines, and the length of the lines determines how the poem looks on the page: long and thin, short and wide, or all in one shape.
- The position of a newline is usually determined by the number of syllables in the line, but is often freely chosen by the poet.
- Line breaks play an important role in setting the rhythm of a poem because they insert a pause between the last word on a line and the first word on the next line. Thus, line breaks often occur at natural pauses in language, such as after punctuation, at the end of a thought, or between different images.
A Common Line Break
Even more important than the content of poetry is that it is often line breaks that enable a text to be recognized as poetry – that is, unlike prose, which does not use line breaks in the same way. Because of this, lines of poetry are considered to be the basic units of poetry, and lines of poetry break the mark of these units. The following chapters cover the basic characteristics and conventions of the use of line breaks in poetry.
The capitalization
Until the 19th century, the first word of every line was capitalized, whether it was the beginning of a new sentence or not. Today, there is no capitalization standard at the top of the line; Some poets do this and some don’t, although this is usually seen as a detail of some form left over from a poetic past. Here, for example, is the first line of an early poem by John Ashbery, which begins each line with a capital letter, although John Ashbery, like many other modern poets, dropped this convention in his later poems.
Newline Characters & Syntax
Syntax is the term for sentence structure and word order. In general, poets place line breaks in their poems so that they do not meaningfully break the syntax of the sentence, but instead create pauses that mimic natural pauses. However, this is not always the case; Some poets use line breaks to intentionally create an unusual rhythm or diction in their poetry. Using a newline character in these two different ways can have very different effects. For example, the following two examples use the same word, but newlines in different places:
But some poets hope to achieve this dissonant effect and use line breaks to purposefully change the way people naturally read a given sentence. E.Cummings, a poet, even went so far in this direction that he broke lines in his words. Here’s an excerpt from a poem by Cumming that uses line breaks to attack natural syntax:
Length of line
Until recently – beginning in the 19th century – the only accepted way of breaking lines was based on the rhythm of poetry. For this reason, in order to understand how it informs the use of line breaks, it is helpful to have a strong grasp of what metrics are.
In formal poetry (poems with strict metrical and rhyme schemes) as well as blank poetry (unhymns with strict metrical schemes), the meter of the poem determines the length of each line by requiring each line to contain a specific number of syllables. Thus, a poem written in iambic pentameter (five iambic pentameters per line) will have one line break in every ten syllables.
In free verse (poetry without any particular rhyme or rhyme scheme), line lines depend on the poet’s desire to create a particular rhythm, or to give more emphasis to certain words by inserting more space around them. In free verse, unlike formal or blank verse, the lines of the entire poem may vary widely, as shown in the following example:
Punctuation
While line breaks themselves often have the effect of creating pauses in the rhythm of poetry, and poets often use punctuation at the end of line breaks, line breaks are not necessarily consistent with the use of punctunities. Lines that end in some form of punctuation are called end stop lines, and lines that don’t end in punctuation are called embedded lines.
Newline And Section Characters
While much of the focus of this article is on line breaking, which separates one line of poetry from the next, line breaking is closely related to stanzas (also known as “double line breaking”), which break lines into several stanzas. For example, the first two sections of Edward Thomas’s “The Green Roads” have two line breaks and one line break:
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As shown above, a stanza character is usually distinguished from a newline character that passes through the added white space between two lines. However, sometimes, especially when poetry is extracted in a piece of prose, line breaks and stanzas can be represented by slashes (/) and double slashes (/), respectively. In this symbol, the first two stanzas of “Green Road” look like this:
In June, the green road at the end of the forest was strewn with white goose feathers, // as if someone had gone to the forest/to show his tracks. But he never came back.
Poetry Without Line Breaks
Some poets write in paragraph form instead of using line breaks. These types of poetry are called prose poetry because they take the form of prose writing.
How do you know what a poem is and isn’t without a broken line? The answer is that it depends a lot on context. This prose poem was written by a famous poet and published in a book surrounded by other poems. But even if it isn’t, any self-contained prose with a beginning and an end like this can be considered prose poetry, as long as the author defines it that way.
Unconventional Line Break
Although all line breaks shown so far are obvious moves from one line to another, some line breaks are more vague or look different than those discussed above.
Indent
Each line of poetry is usually aligned on the left side of the page, but poets sometimes indent a line (move them away from the left) to complicate traditional line breaks. Indentation does not mean that a line is not broken correctly. On the contrary, indentation, like line breaking, further determines the choice of words and sentences or rhythm of poetry. For example, if one line is indented much more than the other, it may be interpreted as a slightly longer pause in front, or a delayed beginning, as if the poet were breathing. The following example is from a poem by Joey Graham. The use of indentation is inconsistent, sometimes even falling in the middle of a line, causing the pause rhythm in the poem. Although the indentation is not neat, each line of this poem has its own line break.
Discarded Line
“Line deletion” is the term used to break a line of poetry into two lines using a specific indentation style, with the first line aligned to the left of the page, but the second line indented so that it starts just below the point where the first line ends on the page.
Dropped calls can be used for a variety of reasons. They can add space in the middle of a line, which is larger and smaller than a typical broken line, and they can add dimension to the poem visually.
The Running Line
If a poet writes a line that is too long to sit uninterrupted on the page when the book goes to press, the line is usually divided into two lines, with the second line indented to indicate that it is a continuation of the previous line.
How To Delete Line Breaks
To remove line breaks, perform the following steps.
Immediately move the mouse cursor to the left of the first word in the line created with the line break.
Click the left mouse button to place the text cursor in front of the first word.
The text cursor is located in front of the first word of the text line.
Press the backspace key to delete line breaks. A line of text created with a newline character moves to the end of the line above it.
or
Immediately move the mouse cursor to the right of the end period of the text line above the line break.
Click the left mouse button to place the text cursor after the period.
The text cursor after the period at the end of the text line.
Press Delete to delete line breaks. The line of text created with a line break moves to the current line after the text cursor.
Summary
A single break that does not start a new paragraph and instead moves the pointer to the following line Use the br> tag in HTML to add a line break. Shift+Enter is the shortcut key to make a line break in other apps like Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer.
