A practical technicality. Many users of WordPress.com find it irritating that one cannot easily add “empty lines” to the the content of their posts and pages. This is because the CMS editor in the visual mode automatically gets rid of blank lines, thus depriving the user of the possibility to compose the content in accordance with her will. In the similar vein, HTML mode is said to be oblivious to some standard markers. However, adding empty paragraphs is possible . It suffices to add a new line of the code with a line breaker in it.
Like this:
<code><br></code>
Type it in the HTML mode of wordpress editor and it will work.
From now on you do not have to imitate the blank line by typing a crude dot coloured same as the background to enjoy blank lines!
GREG LEWICKI 
nadiareads1
03/03/2014
Thanks! That really helped! You have no idea how long I’ve been trying to fix this problem and how many tips that didn’t work I’ve tried!
Gerg
08/26/2015
More thanks for that; excellent.
For a long time just using <br/> worked; I guess because WordPress failed to recognise it. Unfortunately that’s just been broken in the latest update, ruining all my formatting across a year or more of work.
WordPress itself still uses a non-breaking space to get a blank line in the output — enter a blank line with the visual editor and then switch to the text editor to see. Unfortunately that only works if the non-break constitutes a stand-alone paragraph — i.e. is all by itself in the text version, with empty lines above and below it. Otherwise it’ll be stripped out if you switch from text editor to visual editor and back again. It’s worse in the media page description pane. There a non-breaking space gets converted to a plain space whenever you save, and of course is then just ignored.
It’s absurd that such an obvious deficiency has been ignore by WordPress for so long … and that the behavior is different in different places, and changes from version to version. Amateurish, in fact.