greiggy, you've got to open up the external css stylesheet, look at it, and tell us what the style declarations are for p and p.bodyMessg.
We know that in your html you have paragraphs assigned the .bodyMessg style class, and that some of those paragraphs also have a bottom margin assigned, but we don't know what else the stylesheet is telling those paragraphs to do.
There should be a file, probably called styles.css, style.css, stylesheet.css, or something along those lines, containing the bodyMessg declaration. It should contain something like what I posted above:
.bodyMessg {
margin-bottom: .5em;
line-height:1.2em;
}
We need to know what it says.
Also -- as a side note -- I'll give you two free bonus tips today, no extra charge.
First tip: Do you know about ordered and unordered lists? Your example "5. Prepared to battle" looks suspiciously like it could/should be an unordered list. You could do like so:
<ol>
<li>Polish your sword</li>
<li>Gird your loins</li>
<li>Prepare to do battle</li>
</ol>
And you'll get a nicely formatted ordered list that looks like this:
1. Polish your sword
2. Gird your loins
3. Prepare to do battle
Two advantages of tagging your list as an ordered list are that a) the list is formatted with a hanging "outdent" (so that multiline items wrap with the text all aligned and the number off to the left), and b) if you re-order your items, they automatically get renumbered. (A third advantage, if you care about such things, is that your markup will be semantically correct -- i.e., paragraphs are tagged as paragraphs and lists as lists.) So that if you changed your list to:
<ol>
<li>Gird your loins</li>
<li>Polish your sword</li>
<li>Prepare to do battle</li>
</ol>
You'd then get:
1. Gird your loins
2. Polish your sword
3. Prepare to do battle
You can style the ol and li too -- I generally give the ol a generous line-height to make it easy to ready, and use a margin-bottom declaration for li to create some extra vertical spacing between individual list items.
Second free tip: When you have a series of paragraphs and you want to apply a class to all of them, you can save yourself a bunch of typing by
not putting class="bodyMssg" in every p tag. You can wrap the whole series inside a <div class="bodyMssg"></div>, and then put this in your stylesheet:
div.bodyMssg p {
styles here
}
This says, "every p that's inside that div tag should be styled thusly." It will leave the rest of your paragraphs, outside the div tag, alone, but will style all the paragraphs inside the div.
But we
really need to see the declarations in your stylesheet to figure out what's going on. If you have this online somewhere, a link would help.
