A good book designer/typesetter will try not to leave a single word on the last line of a paragraph under any circumstances, especially not at the end of a page.

In case this is common, do some book designers take care about justifying paragraphs in a way that prevents this. E.g. making sure that there are a few more words on the last line of a paragraph when it ends on a recto so it has more visual weight and isn’t missed by distracted dorks like myself?

All book typographers take care in avoiding that. Lesser designers can make that mistake, and it very much is an error to not adjust your way out of that situation.

Do you know whether applications such as InDesign or Quark can do this automatically (either as a build in feature or with 3rd party plugins)? It seems to be in the same similar complexity category as the widow/orphan control features that everybody supports. However, I have not seen this yet but I just might not have looked in the right places. Especially as I don't know the terminology for "lone word at end of paragraph. This thread here on Typophile suggests that those loners may be called widows after all. Or "runts" or "stragglers".
The fact that I usually see them in cheap books could be a hint that most software can't handle those automatically. Or that the switch one has to turn on to handle them automatically is hidden away so that those cheap-book-peddlers can't afford to find it ;)

In all my decades in book work, I have never heard it stated as a general rule that a single word in the last line of a paragraph is a bad thing. Not even in the last line of a page.

When you do leave a single word on that last line, it is a good idea to make sure that single word is longer than the ¶ indent on the following line.

I also try to avoid breaking the last word of any paragraph, so there will not be some kind of "non-word" on the last line. In well-designed and well-set books, the word "hide" in Lars's example would most likely be longer than the ¶ indent.

I might make an exception were I told by a publisher that a book I was designing/setting was to be aimed at an audience of people who were not highly skilled readers.

& I've never been involved in the production of "cheap books" (unless you are making a value judgement about the content). In fact, I've set plenty of ¶s like that in really expensive books. So that argument holds no water, at least when I'm in the room.

If people are missing words such as Lars's "hide," they are reading too fast. Slow down, savor the text, get involved with it. You'll miss fewer words.

powers

Thanks for sharing the insight. I agree, slowing down helps. It doesn't happen that often but I find it really interesting to hear about this from a book design perspective.

It may also be a question of reading technique. At work, I often have to read large amounts of text rather fast in order to get an overview of some material. And in order to do that I try to read words in clusters rather then single words. Thus, if there is no cluster for my eyes to latch on to, I may miss something. This is OK when doing the kind of scanning and skimming I talked about.

Will, what you wrote reminds me that I need to actively remember to get out of that mode when I'm "really" reading.

Thanks again,
Lars