To typeset a paragraph of ordinary text, just type the text in your source file like this. Put line breaks wherever you want, and don’t worry about extra spaces between words, which LaTeX will ignore. You can almost always trust LaTeX to make your paragraphs look good, with neatly justified margins.

To start a new paragraph, just leave a blank line in your source file.

A few punctuation characters require special treatment in LaTeX. There are no “smart quotes,” so you need to use the left-quote key (at the top-left corner of the keyboard) for a left quote, and the ordinary apostrophe key (next to the semi-colon) for a right quote. Hit either key twice for double quotes, which are standard in American English. Don’t use shift-apostrophe to make double quotes. Use single quotes when they’re nested inside a double-quoted quotation. When a period or comma belongs at the end of a quotation, put it inside the quotes—even if it’s not part of what you’re quoting.\cite{nevermindlogic}

Your fingers also need to distinguish between a hyphen (used for multi-word adjectives and for hyphenated names like Lennard-Jones), an en-dash (formed by typing two consecutive hyphens, and used for ranges of numbers like 1–100), and an em-dash (formed out of three consecutive hyphens and used as an attention-getting punctuation symbol—preferably not too often).

Some non-alphanumeric symbols like $, &, and % have special meanings in a LaTeX source file, so if you want these symbols to appear in the output, you need to precede them with a backslash.

There are also special codes for generating the various accents that can appear in foreign-language words and names, such as Ampère and Schrödinger.\cite{FontEncodingComment}

You can switch to italic, bold, and typewriter fonts when necessary. Use curly braces to enclose the text that is to appear in the special font. In general, LaTeX uses curly braces to group characters together for some common transformation.

Notice that any word or symbol preceded by the backslash character is a special instruction to LaTeX, typically used to produce a special symbol or to modify the typeset output in some way. These instructions are also called control sequences or macros. After you’ve used LaTeX for a while, the little finger of your right hand will be really good at finding the backslash and curly-brace keys.