Using Excerpts

Hi,

So far I’ve been customizing my installation of WP with lots of success – however, I’m getting stuck dealing with excerpts and the “read more” function.

What I want is basically as follows: my ‘excerpt’ to ‘summary’ of the news posting to appear on the main page, and then below it the ‘read more’ link to see the whole article (the ‘read more’ link is fine, and I’ve customized it). However, when I use the MORE quicktag, to split the page, it seperates it into two paragraphs, so if I have something like: “The quick brown fox jumped over…” as my excerpt, then I use more, and then I put “the lazy dog.”, when I view the article I get:

The quick brown fox…
jumped over the lazy dog.

How can I use the excerpts/summaries correctly so that it shows a section of the first paragraph, and then when you view the article keeps that paragraph and the article intact and not broken up?

I’m sure I’m making this harder than it should be – thanks for any help!