Invisible formatting

Does anybody else hate MS Word's invisible formatting? Where if you accidentally delete one then suddenly a big chunk of your file goes wonky? Does anyone know if there's a way to reveal them?

Specifically I'm trying to post a story to a critique forum and just one phrase disappears though it's formatting is totally identical to every other word in the document as far as I can tell. It's the following sentence:

My jet touched down in Des Moines at eleven, and I walked into the diner at eleven thirty.

The "eleven thirty" at the end of the sentence disappears when I copy it to a particular forum. Blogger wouldn't even allow the post because of HTML tags it didn't like, so this is a retyping of it c(I'm not saying it's Blogger's fault, just further annoyance). That one sentence had about 100 lines of HTML formatting crammed around it.

A quick Google search reveals this is a common complaint about Word. Other word processors have an optional "reveal" that allows you to edit this stuff. *sigh* Why do I use Word again?