Weird text formatting

[YKeeg]

Hopefully someone out there has an idea of what's going on here. Occasionally, I'll type out or paste text into InDesign and the formatting is just... weird. Certain characters are superscripts and others aren't, and this "classy country club magazine" looks like a ransom letter.

This only happens with this publication; possibly something left over on the template or in the paragraph styles from before my time. Problem is, I can't figure out how to get the text NORMAL, as it is on 99% of the rest of the publication.

Looks like h, i, s, t, d, et cetera are superscripted, but W, x, p u, et cetera are normal sized. It does seem to be the same characters each time. I looked in the paragraph styles for ligatures and such, and none of those boxes are checked. I'm attaching a sample image below. I eventually find a workaround when this happens, but I'm not sure what I do and I'm thinking this is aberrant behavior that should be nipped at the source.

Any ideas?

[Scott Citron]

What happens when you Shift-Option/Alt click on the name of the paragraph style? Doing so should clear all character styles. If you manually clear all character and paragraph styles, and then apply your paragrah style, does your type look like your example? Also, check for a nested GREP style that might be the offender.

[YKeeg]

Well, already that little trick has fixed an irritating subheader problem I'm having! So thank you for that tip!

I went into the "hostage note" paragraph style and clicked off of "ordinals" (not sure what that does or WHY it was ticked), and that seemed to slick it up.

Thank you so much for your response. If I ever see this again, I'm going to use that trick.