When you copy and paste from one application to another, many unseen formatting commands are potentially pasted with your text. This can be particularly problematic when copying from the web to Word, because Word will respond to several formatting commands that don't necessarily show up in Word's formatting options (in other words, you can't easily change the formatting that gets carried over).

Word has a simple fix for this. After copying your text from the internet, toggle to Word. In the Home menu, click the down arrow beneath the paste icon (far left of the ribbon menu in 2007). Select "Paste Special." A Paste Special window appears. In that window, select unformatted text and okay. This will scrub your copied text of all formatting commands and bring in only the text. You can then format the pasted text normally.