I can’t figure out how to get the word ‘moon’ to align with the minim. It seems that Dorico is recognizing the four quavers as melisma, but not the two. I’m assuming that it is a simple thing and I just don’t know the right term to look in the manual under, because I’ve been going through that without success so far.
When you extended the popover by pressing Space, Dorico should automatically left-align lyrics that span 2+ notes and show an extender line after them. If you select the lyric “moon”, press Return to bring up the lyrics popover again, and press Space to advance the popover to the end of the phrase (up to the next note on the staff), you’ll see the recalculation.
You can change the alignment of lyrics manually too. I’d be interested to know what you were searching, in case that can improve this topic’s position in search results.
Thanks Lillie. When I did as you suggested, the window moved on to the A#, but didn’t move the word ‘moon’. It might be relevant that this is the last word and last notes in the score at the moment, so there isn’t another note & word to move on to yet.
One other thing that might be relevant: since I think in Finale one types a hyphen for each note of the melisma, that’s what I was initially doing. I noticed that in the lyric editor that came out as of-the-moon, and when I removed the hyphens, the first melisma (of) is fine, but the second (the) seemingly isn’t.
Oh and I was just reading through the material on entering lyrics from the head entry
No, you don’t use hyphens in Finale unless the word is hyphenated. Same thing here: just press spacebar to advance the popover to the next note.
You mean, I assume, syllabic hyphenated, rather than grammatic? Anyways I’ve forgotten how to do various things in Finale, not just this 
but it is a worthwhile point, how to do the hyphenating: I was half-expecting the act of inserting a hyphen to automatically move on to the next note, but the space after seems to be necessary.