Formatting Instagram Captions with Spaces

I’ll spare you jibber-jabber about the annoying issues anybody faces when trying to format their Instagram post captions, but let’s summarize it with it’s bloody finniky.

I’ve tried everything, from using text editor, Evernote, Turtl, Word, WordPress, to markdown (as I’m sure you have), but there always seems to be something just a little off – and by that, I mean new paragraph spacing.

Instagram does such a beautiful job with editing photographs, why is it so tricky to recognize new lines? The least they could do would be to allow markdown. Maybe in one foul swoop they’d both make the internet cleaner and help raise the IQ (internet quotient) of the world.

I said I’d spare the jibber-jabber.

4 Things to Try to Make Instagram Captions Look Nicer

1. Don’t Write Copy In Instagram

It’s kind of unanimous that Instagram copy shouldn’t be written in Instagram itself. My editor of choice is using Evernote which I use my computer to write the caption on, then sync it, and a few seconds later, it shows up on my phone and I’m able to copy/paste the text into the Instagram caption space.

2. Remove Spaces at the End of Paragraphs

This one for some reason always gets me. Perhaps it’s because inside of a paragraph, one always uses a space after a period so my muscle memory is pretty solid. So, at the end of a paragraph, after the period, don’t put a space. You’ll still want to press enter, probably two times: once to start a new line, once to create that spacing line.

3. Use Periods for Paragraph Spacing

You may have seen this one, so this tip may be a little bit obvious, but if you use a period for the new line, it usually sticks and makes your paragraph break occur. How is it done? Let’s use tip 2, with a period. So, press enter at the end of the paragraph (without a space at the end of the paragraph), add a period, press enter (without a space after the period), then start typing away with your next paragraph.

4. Find an Editor that Automatically Adds Paragraph Breaks

I’m still testing this one, but I thought I’d add it for those of you who are very frustrated with everything else. I’ve found that if I do my caption editing in the visual editor of WordPress fully, copy/paste it into Evernote, sync it, then copy into Instagram I get my spaces.

My suspicion about why this works is two fold. First, WordPress actually adds a line break in there, even though I can’t really see it. Secondly, WordPress strips out the spaces at the end of a paragraph automatically.

That’s it. Do you have any more tips? I’d love to hear.