why are there wide spaces between some words in my document?

Perhaps the text is Justified? Or perhaps there are actually extra spaces (turn on the display of nonprinting characters to make it easier to spot these)?

From the Keyboard you can use <CTL><SHF><8> to toggle on display non-printing characters On and off. Or you can mouse to the Home tab / Paragraph group / the "backward" P icon.

Justified means that Word forces left and right margins to be flush, straight line. Unfortunately, Word is all thumbs when it comes to doing this. It always has been.

There are 2 compatibility options you should also check in File tab / Options command / Advanced option / Compatibilty section:

WordPerfect (WP) has "always" done full justification the way that old style manual printers did, by "intelligently" expanding and contracting spaces between letters AND word. Word takes the simple, brute force approach of only adding full spaces between words. This makes the word appear too far apart. This can be controlled by turning on the following option in the document:

Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows: To achieve full justification, WordPerfect compresses the spaces between words while Word expands them. This often results in different line breaks and leads to different page breaks.

When Justification is turned on, Word will grossly expand short lines that end early using th <SHF><ENTER> soft return character. Turning on the next option will prevent this

Don't expand character spaces on the line ending Shift-Return: When a "justified" line of text ends with SHIFT+ENTER, Word prevents extra spacing between words and makes the line appear as "Align Left".

In File tab / Options command / Display option: In the "Always show these formatting marks on screen" pick the nonprinting characters you want to see. Personally, I go with "Show all formatting marks". 

To tell if a para is "justified" you want to check the paragraph alignment. The visual way is to look a the Home tab / Paragraph group to see which of the alignment icons is highlighted (orange on my machine) to indicate that it is turned on. Another way is with the <SHF><F1> shortcut. This toggles display of the "Reveal Formatting" pane. Look in the Paragraph section, under "Alignment".

When you find a para with the justified option turned on, check to see if it has the same, expected, style applied. Justification may have been manually applied to override the style based justification.  You can try using <CTL><Q> shortcut to remove manual formatting applied to the paragraph (like you can use <CTL><SHF><Spacebar> to remove manual character formatting).

The following link goes into a couple of other things to look for:

Getting Rid of Choppiness in Justified Text

**http://wordribbon.tips.net/Pages/T008139\_Getting\_Rid\_of\_Choppiness\_in\_Justified\_Text.html******