By default, WordPress and most blogging programs turn every line into a paragraph. When you hit the ENTER or RETURN button on your keyboard, it puts in a line break which WordPress interprets as the end of a sentence.
Thus, the underlying code of your paragraph looks like this:
<p>This is a paragraph of text that goes on, wrapping around the line over and over again, until you finally get to the end of the paragraph and hit the ENTER key.</p> <p>Then a new paragraph is started on the next line and on your blog post, there is a space between each paragraph, set by the blog designer in your CSS stylesheet. The space is wider on some blog designs and narrower on others.</p>
This looks like the paragraphs you see in this article, with a space between each paragraph, created by the
P Paragraph HTML tag.
An example of a block of text in which you control the length of the line, but each line is on top of the other with no paragraph spacing between the lines, such as poetry, is:
We shall never cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
You have three options for making single spaces between lines.
In the Visual Editor of WordPress, hold down the SHIFT then ENTER keyboard key. The next line will be right under the first.
In the Text/HTML Editor for WordPress, you have a choice to simply make one ENTER between the lines rather than the two required for paragraphs, or use the HTML for the line break code to force the line breaks.
To force a line break manually, add a line break HTML tag to the end of each line
We shall never cease from exploration<br /> And the end of all our exploring<br /> Will be to arrive where we started<br /> And know the place for the first time.<br /> <cite>T. S. Eliot</cite>
WordPress will automatically wrap the whole thing in a Paragraph tag, but will honor the line breaks so each line appears on it’s own with no spacing between.
This technique works for recipes, addresses, poetry, and other times you wish to have only a single line between other lines.
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