[Tex/LaTex] Centering a line above a one-page document

horizontal alignmenttitles

I am writing a one-page research statement that goes basically like this:

Research Statement, First name, Last name

Statement here

I'm trying not to use a title, since it's bigger in font and has a bit of spacing from my first paragraph which I don't want.

Instead of using a title, I tried just 

\centering Research Statement, First name, Last name

but this seems to have the effect of centering all of my subsequent paragraphs.

How can I get around this issue?

Best Answer

(Based on earlier comments.)

If you want to have some vertical space automatically added as you centre some text, then the center environment is normally the way to go:

\begin{center}
Research Statement, First name, Last name
\begin{center}

Note that you can easily add paragraphs as normal:

\begin{center}
Research Statement

First name Last name
\begin{center}

or, if needed, use \\ to create a newline, but not \newline:

\begin{center}
Research Statement\\ % forcing linebreaks in this way should be avoided in most cases, however
First name Last name
\begin{center}

You can also use the \centering command, but you must be careful to use groups to avoid the subsequent lines being centred as well:

{\par\centering <this is the centered text>\par}

or:

{\par\centering <this is the % here we add a new paragraph the usual way: by adding a blank line between paragraphs

 centered text>\par}

Note the use of \par, which is needed to make \centering 'work' the way you probably expect.

By itselt, \centering adds no vertical space before or after it, so you need to combine it with vertical spacing commands commands such as \bigskip, \medskip, \smallskip, or \vspace

Some preliminary text...

\bigskip

{\par\centering <this is the centered text>\par}

\smallskip

More text ...

But this starts becoming ad hoc 'coding' and usually should be limited to pretty isolated instances. (E.g., using them once or twice on a title page is probably better than designing a whole custom environment [unless you enjoy designing], but using them a dozen times across a whole document is liable to make the document inconsistent in its style and harder to maintain, overall.)

Related Question