There is, though, a much easier way to change the top margin here without creating a new section. Not least among these is potentially having to manipulate the section break or the text around it multiple times in order to get the margins to work like you’re wanting. In this context, using section breaks to manipulate the top margin may have undesirable side effects. That change might need to change where the division falls between that page and the one following. The same isn’t true in the body of the other major logical sections of your document.įor these, you may very well want to make a change on the first page. When (Not) to Use Section Breaks to Change Essay Margins You’re never going to make edits to your title page and want text to flow over from there onto the next page. Your title page is only ever going to be one page. But this usefulness partly depends there being a hard division in content between your title page and what comes next. The first page of a major section (e.g., your essay body, a chapter, an appendix, your bibliography), which should have a 2-inch top margin.įor title pages, using section breaks to achieve the necessary margin sizes is useful.
There are two common kinds of exceptions to this: 2 If you’re writing the degree program you’re in, SBL style normally requires four 1-inch page margins.