How do I display excerpts of posts on my index page?

I have a related problem. <!--more--> on the front page is working just fine, but when you click on the link, you get a 404 page.

On the one example I have, the link is: …blog address…/2008/10/02/watered-down-writing/#more-12. I looked in the files and the folder 2008 doesn’t exist, let alone the rest of the address.

The only thing I can think of is that I have a couple of options that are fighting with each other over where the full article belongs. I can edit the article just fine from the admin dashboard, so it’s out there somewhere.

Any ideas of where to look?

My blog uses excerpt and ends the excerpt with […]

I’d rather it end with “Read more blah blah”. Right now, it has both as the link below shows you. I need to get rid of the useless […]. Appreciate any pointers.

https://www.meryl.net/section/blog/

Would like to fix it on the home page too.
https://www.meryl.net/

Actually, I would like th blog page not to show excerpts and instead show the_content(). But whenever I use that code — the paragraph formatting turns into a blob.

I already have a big blob problem (lack of formatting). This one was not a blob at one point, but it is now.
https://www.meryl.net/2009/01/7-traits-of-bad-twitter-follows/

I do NOT use Word. I often write the post in Firefox 3.0 right in the editor. I read the paragraph posts and saw references to Tiny_MCE, but don’t see how that affects this.

Thank you in advance for any help. Golly — it’s so unreadble.

Here are screen shots…

Poorly WordPress formatted post: https://twitpic.com/1eo26

Correctly formatted WP post (except for image) https://twitpic.com/1eo2j

OK, I disabled the HTML-editor… and face editing over 2000 posts as it looks like I have to enter the paragraphs, too… or is there a faster way?