This has been outstanding forever. When creating wrapping expression, either through a code reformatting operation with line wrapping enabled or by breaking a string down into two strings by simply hitting Enter inside a string, the Sun Coding Guidelines have a clear preference to break BEFORE the operator. In other words, prefer this: callMe("A multiline " + "string"); over this: callMe("A multiline " + "string"); See http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/html/CodeConventions.doc3.html#248 for details. One should be able to actuate this behavior through a config option and it should be default behavior IMO. The chosen severity class reflects my strict preference to follow the guidelines where they exist.