<p>I've seen threads and websites talk about the paragraph breaks but can somebody give me a step by step method of getting paragraph breaks into my essays on common app? I've tried everything including, writing essay in Notepad then pasting into Common app, hitting "enter" between where I want paragraphs in the text editor box for common app, hitting "enter" twice in those spaces...nothing manages to get me the paragraph breaks when previewing the essay in the submission preview page.</p>
<p>My son just did cut and paste from textedit and when he hit “preview”, the paragraph breaks were all there. Texedit because he has a mac. You used notepad because you have a PC?</p>
<p>My D originally cut and pasted her essay from Microsoft Word into the Common App. It wasn’t coming in correctly. So she retyped it in directly into the Common App. At the end of each paragraph she hit the return button once. When she looked at it after typing it in, it appears as one big paragraph. However, when she generated the PDF when submitting to colleges the essay came out perfect with correct paragraphs and blank lines between each paragraph.</p>
<p>Be sure you are looking at the pdf preview page when deciding if your formatting looks acceptable. That requires hitting the “submit” button to generate a pdf preview of the full application, including the essay. You can close the pdf and continue editing. Your work will not actually be submitted until you proceed to e-sign the application.</p>
<p>Yah PC so have to use Notepad. And @niceday, that’s the page I’m looking at which is why I’m so confused…the formatting should be correct on that page from what I’m reading but I still get this large block of text. I’ll probably manually type in the essay or see if I can borrow a friend’s Mac for the upload. Sigh…common app doing its very best to make the college app process even more frustrating than it already is.</p>
<p>^^ Same issue. I first tried copy and paste and it looked awful. Went into notepad and only pasted part of the essay.</p>
<p>Figured i’d just type the whole thing in the box manually and just did that. Put the paragraph breaks in but when I hit continue and went back to look at it, it was one big paragraph. Went to “preview” and one big paragraph. Maybe i’ll try it on a Mac and see how that goes.</p>
<p>Actually contacted the common app people for help and they replied “The breaks will appear in the pdf” when I had clearly told him they were not appearing in the pdf…having a hard time believing how terrible CA4 is.</p>
<p>glad it’s not just me. i also just sent an email. please let us know if they say anything else. Guess you should reply back and say “no it won’t”. would hate to send an essay looking like I don’t know how to structure a paragraph LOL.</p>
<p>Which browser are you using? I’ve heard that makes a difference. IE9 has worked for D14. She did the Notepad route, hitting Enter twice between paragraphs.</p>
<p>So I used a friend’s Mac (copied my essay into TextEdit already in paragraph forms, then copied/pasted into the Common App text box) and it worked! Also, used Safari in this case. </p>
<p>As far as different browsers go, I haven’t been able to get the PDF preview to even show up on IE and Chrome. When using my PC, I can only get the PDF preview to show up through Firefox.</p>
<p>It seems like the Mac/TextEdit/Safari option works…but that’s not exactly a great solution IMO.</p>
<p>I emailed the word doc. of my essay to a Mac and was able to copy/paste into the box. It made the format kind of screwy so I had to do a bunch of backspacing, moving around. I opened up the PDF preview and it looked ok.</p>
<p>Insert <br> and you will see paragraph breaks in the pdf preview.</p>
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<p>This didn’t work for us.</p>
<p>I submitted my Common App today after many tries to get the paragraph line breaks to show correctly in the pdf. First, make sure you have your essay left-aligned in Word, with no double spacing in the paragraphs. Then make it one big block. Then at where you want to insert a break, hit shift+enter 3 times, so there will be 2 empty lines between each paragraph. Copy/paste into common app, click “continue”/“save”. Then go back to common app essay portion and re-add the breaks. </p>
<p>this is what worked for me i believe.</p>
<p>Uggh! Having the same problem. Just e-mailed the Common App. I tried every single suggestion on the PC that all of you posted and none of them worked. I retyped it - that didn’t work. Then I headed to the Mac to see if TextEdit would work and it didn’t! I guess I will wait for an answer from Common App before submitting my essay in one big paragraph!</p>
<p>My essay FINALLY worked correctly. I have a Mac and tried copying and pasting from every word processor I have - Pages, Preview, and Textedit - and nothing worked, Common App kept trying to submit it in a big block. Then I switched browsers from Firefox to Safari and pasted in the essay from Textedit and the PDF preview worked, all my paragraph breaks and italics are there. Thank goodness this headache is finally over.</p>
<p>Just noticed one slightly odd thing - all my italicized phrases seemed to go up a font size and overlap a tiny bit with the line beneath. But at this point, after jumping through so many hoops, I think I’m just going to leave it be. Everything else works.</p>
<p>Yes bold/underlined/italized stuff will look different as the font size seems to jump up a bit. Common App is aware of this issue and they say they will fix it and the fix will be applied to previous applications as well as future ones</p>