Hopefully JIRA won't mess up with the whitespace. This is the current way to deal with multiline strings: class Alpha: def Bravo(): s = """ Dear Foobar, Blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Sincerely, Barfoo""" This would be a great way to do them, notice the indentation is kept in tact, but would give the same end result. class Alpha: def Bravo(): s = """ Dear Foobar, Blah blah blah, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. Sincerely, Barfoo""" This is mostly handy in keeping a block as one distinct unit, by having the current indentation, the block with the string drools into the previous ones.