OK, thank you for the interest Jim. Let's back up a bit.

I believe I understand how to use styles for paragraph formatting. My task is: I had been successfully bolding certain characters in certain words through CTRL+B keystrokes.

I did not see new styles being created to reflect that, but alright, I do not know how Word handles bold in individual characters.

As I tried to explain, if I have the sentence: See Spot run.

If I wanted to bold the letter t, I selected just the letter to apply CTRL+B for the desired result: See Spot run.

However, what has been happening to me is that I select just the letter t, apply bold, and the selection EXPANDS to create this result:

See Spot run.

I was only speculating that I had messed up a style setting. This same thing, the expansion of the selection to include 3 characters, also sometimes happens when I try to apply a true MS Word Style.

But to be clear, it happens with CTRL+B, but not CTRL+I or CTRL+U.