Your problem results from having shading used as both paragraph and font (character) formatting. You can easily tell this. The paragraph shading shows as a rectangle that extends from left indent to right indent (usually margin to margin). The character
shading extends only as far as the characters in a line, which means the shading on left aligned text will have a ragged right.
You can select the entire document and click No color from the shading icon to get rid of the paragraph shading. For the character shading, we have to delete it paragraph by paragraph. In W2010&13, select all of each paragraph except for its
paragraph mark or select any portion of the paragraph that covers the shading, then click
No colo r. In W2007 and, I think, W2003, the No color won't work unless only the shaded characters are selected.