As you are deciding upon the type of object to use, you'll want to pay attention to your page layout, as not all objects flow smoothly when it comes to spanning page breaks. For instance, you can't add footnotes or endnotes to the text, nor can the text be referenced by comments. The only drawback to this approach is that the text within the object is limited in some respects. Then you can format the object so that it has the type of border you desire. You can easily adjust the position of the object so that the text aligns properly relative to other text in the document. The best way to handle this situation is to create some sort of object that can possess a border (such as a single-cell table, a text box, a frame, or a shape) and then place the text inside that object. (You can see this if you select a paragraph, display the Borders and Shading dialog box, and then click on Options.) When you change the margins for a paragraph-as is done if you have a bulleted or numbered list-then the position of the border on those paragraphs will be different than it is for the surrounding paragraphs. The reason that this happens is that the borders you add to a paragraph are always added relative to the paragraph margins. Marc wonders if there is a way to simply border all the paragraphs in the text selection. It appears that the border is "broken" whenever he changes the indent on the bulleted list paragraphs.
Marc doesn't get a nice, simple border around the text, though. The text consists of multiple paragraphs, including a lead-in paragraph followed by a bulleted list. Marc is trying to put a border around some text in his document.