The “More Tag” is a handy thing to use when you have long posts and don’t want your readers to have to scroll down through each one to see your recent activity.

The “More Tag” allows you to decide where you want the text to break, and inserts a link to the single post in its entirety.

(Another option is to go to Settings > Reading > For each article in a feed, show *Summary – but this invokes a hard and fast rule, inserting the break in every post after a specified number of characters.  You may want more flexibility, which you have when manually inserting the breaks where – and if – you want them.)

In any post, at any point in writing it, simply place your cursor where you want the break to appear, and click the “Insert More Tag” icon in the toolbar. Make sure that you allow a space between the end of the last word and the tag insertion.

And here’s how it looks in both the visual and text views… note that you can verify that leading space in the text view.

But sometimes, it doesn’t seem to work!  The hard-won answer is that it is all in the view.  Here’s what I mean:  in the preview (which shows the full post), there’s no break in the text.

But once published, it showed up on the site’s home page!  The problem was not solved by publishing, but by the fact that after it was published, it displayed on the main page with all the other posts, not by itself.

So any time the post is displayed by itself – in preview or in the full page view, the reader will see the whole post.  But any time the post is included in a list of multiple posts, the break displays as it was designed to do.  Examples of the ‘multiple post’ scenario would also include results from a tag, category or search results list.

In this theme, the default wording is “Continue reading” with an arrow.  Other themes may default to “Read more…” or just “more”.   There are several customization options; for more information, see Customizing the Read More.