Virtue – Blog Posts Summary Page Excerpts

Hello… hoping someone would be able to help me with this:

I’ve been using the free version of the Virtue wordpress template (which I think is great). I managed to customize it to fit the needs of my site, but I just noticed that my blog posts summary page isn’t showing my posts the way I’d like.

On previous themes I’ve had the blog page show about 5 posts, with full formatting and everything, and show the entire post. Even on other blog sites I see regular post excerpts followed by a “read more” link at the end, but with these options available all the formatting seems to be stripped down.

I was able to figure out how to increase the excerpt length, and even add a “read more” button at the end of the excerpt (because they weren’t showing up for posts without manually entered excerpts), but what I basically want is to show a larger post excerpt on my Blog Summary page that keeps the same formatting and layout that’s on my single blog post page (even if it’s just the most recent single post like this one here, and the other’s are the way they are now).

Note: My Front Page displays are set to “static”, my posts are going to https://nowyourecooking.ca/blog.

Also, some of my excerpts say “continue reading” (I typed in manual excerpts for these) and others say “continued” (no manual excerpts typed in). Just wondering where I can find the file to make them the same (or is it another function.php code?).

This is what I have in function.php:

<?php

function manual_excerpt_more( $excerpt ) {
	$excerpt_more = '';
	if( has_excerpt() ) {
    	$excerpt_more = '?<a href="' . get_permalink() . '" rel="nofollow">... CONTINUE READING</a>';
	}
	return $excerpt . $excerpt_more;
}
add_filter( 'get_the_excerpt', 'manual_excerpt_more' );

?>

Just wondering if all this is possible in this template, otherwise I might have to default to “portrait image” in the Theme Settings. Hope it doesn’t sound too confusing. Thanks in advance!