Depending on your discipline you write your scientific papers with either MS Word or you prepare them with a more professional text formatter like LaTeX.

Besides scientific papers scientist produce all kinds of other documents. I often notice that those MS-Word prepared documents have an ugly ragged right side, or have a repugnant flood of white space. With a little more effort it is possible to produce text, even with MS Word, with a professional look. Two aspects are important: hyphenation and justification.

Hy-phen-ation
When I look at the documents the Dutch ministeries produce, I must come to the conclusion that hyphenation is either never heard off or it is forbidden. In the Dutch language a complication is that in a sequence of nouns the nouns are combined into one word. So the Dutch language has a number of very long words, like “regeringsvoornemen” or “onafhankelijksverklaringstekst”. Using long words in a text without hyphenation makes the text ugly and unclear.

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