The hard line break moves the next word to the be­gin­ning of a new line with­out start­ing a new paragraph.

A hard line break can help con­trol text flow when a car­riage re­turn won’t work. For in­stance, this head­ing breaks awkwardly:

Sup­pose you want the line to break be­fore fin­ished. That way, the first line will end in a more log­i­cal place and the two lines will be bal­anced. If you use a car­riage re­turn, you’ll get:

Not what you want. In­stead, put a hard line break af­ter to be:

Hard line breaks are also use­ful for sep­a­rat­ing the lines of an ad­dress (for in­stance, on let­ter­head). See cen­tered text for an­other ex­am­ple of the hard line break in use.