Indenting error?

Authoring Inform 7
1

For some reason, every single paragraph(?) of code code structure like this:

Instead of blah:
  if blah:
    blah;
    blah.

in my code (there’s like, three) produces errors saying the indenting is wrong and that the 2nd line is the problem.
So I tried removing the indenting from the 2nd and subsequent lines like this:

Instead of blah:
if blah:
  blah;
  blah.

which did the trick at first until some code structured like this:

Instead of blah:
if blah:
  blah;
  blah.
else if blah:
  blah.

gave off some error saying that its a definition of a phrase, and that it “doesn’t begin as it should”.

Here’s an example of code that gives off the first error, AND another one saying that there’s “no definition” (referring to the first line):

Instead of an actor going a direction(called the direction) in the room Mountainside
	if the direction is west:
		say "[the actor] can't go west, as there is an impassable mountain."
	else if the direction is east:
		say "[the actor] can't go east, as there is an impassable river."

Excuse me if the answers here are obvious, I’m kinda new to inform 7.

2

You need a colon after the first line, and a semicolon after the third. (Also, I don’t know if this will cause problems, but “called the direction” probably isn’t a good idea. In this case you can just refer to “the noun”, which is a global variable referring to the object of the verb.)