Hmmm, I used the regular Excerpt field with no plugin whatsoever and it works great.

Amanda¿¿¿¿ 1 month¿¿¿ The plugin¿¿¿
Please.

Great, please post the Plugin link in case other users have the same issue!

Thank you for the help. I installed an excerpt plugin and it works as I would like it to now.

Amanda, I see what you mean now. Okay, so this is actually a Wordpress issue. For some reason, Wordpress strips formatting of Excerpts. It hasn't come up that often, but I imagine there could be a plugin out there that allows the formatting to hold.

With that said, it sounds like the other issue is that you don't have actual separate control of that text. This theme obviously uses the intro text, not a separate field. You may want to try a plugin for using an Excerpt, or search around the forums to see if other users have done this.

Sorry I don't have a solid solution for this...

If you look at the sample layout setup, when you are looking at the main page (not a specific post) you see the Featured Image followed by the Title, Post Author details, and then Excerpt - a small blurb (the first few lines of the post/story). While most of my posts will be my own stories, I do review books and when I do those posts, I generally include the Title, Author, Publisher, and other details as well as links to various sites (Amazon, Goodreads, author and publisher site, etc.) as the first part, then a synopsis of the book, and finally my review.

For these review posts, instead of having the center-formatted Title, Author, etc. pulled into a paragraph for the Excerpt, I would like to choose what text is used for that. For example, a bit of the synopsis, or an attention getting blurb from my review as that will encourage people to read the post more so than general details.

I have added a book review to my site to test out how that will look, so you can see what I am referring to by visiting http://www.stainsonthepage.com and look at the main page, as well as the post page.

Thanks!

I'm not sure I follow, can you try and explain further for me?

Is there a way to choose what part of the post is the excerpt in this theme? I currently list some details, but when transferred into a paragraph style for the excerpt, they don't look good or read well. I would prefer the excerpt to be a short synopsis of the post instead, but I can't see where I can include that.

For an example please see stainsonthepage.com (I'm in the process of moving to this site, so there is only the one example post up.)