You can use the more tag. Place the more tag where you want your post to be ‘cut off’ and then on the homepage you should see a link to read more.
You can also look for a plugin called “excerpts”. When you are entering your post there is an extra entry where you can enter just a few lines and if this is entered then that is what shows. Works good!
Andrea
http://www.andreabiz.com
http://www.pampermeplace.net
You can use a plugin such as andrea suggested or just go into your theme’s index.php file and change it there. If you decide to dive into the code, open up index.php and look for a piece of code that should be
<?php the_content(); ?>
This displays the entire post instead of just a small snippet like you are looking for. To display a small snippet with a link to read the entire post change
<?php the_content(); ?>
over to
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
Doing this will only show the first 55 words of your post which can end up quite short. I wrote a blog post awhile back ago about how to change the WordPress excerpt length awhile ago.