The good thing about Wordpress is that there are so many different plugins to let you customize it all you want.  The original software package, as amazing as it is, is not 100% search engine friendly.

A lot of blogs worry about receiving duplicate content penalties (from Google and other search engines) because their post shows completely on their index page, category pages, archives pages, etc.  If you are worried about this, consider using the evermore plugin.  This plugin allows you to display excerpts based on the number of words you specify that you want to show.  Usually people chose to extract the first paragraph and then show the rest of the post on a different page.

If SEO is the only thing you are going for, a blog that uses excerpts from articles instead of showing the whole blog post on the listing pages is probably better off.  It’s the safest way to ensure duplicate content penalties won’t harm you.  (I however, have yet to see duplicate content penalties on the same domain… I think it’s kind of a myth.  As long as you don’t go crazy and post 100 pages of the same content, I think you’ll be fine.  Google is smart enough to know how wordpress works)

You might notice that this site, shows the full posts on all of it’s pages.  Other than my thought that same domain duplicate content penalties is a myth, I feel that the full post per page is a lot easier on the readers… and users always come first IMO.

Another thing that people often do is manipulate robots.txt to block some pages.  I, personally, would not use the robots.txt to avoid duplicate content on a blog. Ask yourself - Do you really want to stop Google from accessing a content page and wasting all incoming links to that page? If Google encounters duplicate content the next question for google is -  what page gets the authority for the duplicate content? Who the F’ cares if google is weighing one page on your site against another, until enough new posts are created to push that content off of the frontpage.

If you are really worried about this(I think it is a waste of time weighing the small benefit), the ideal situation to avoid duplicate content would go beyond the scope of the evermore Plugin. You are still using portions of exact content that is contained on other pages, and Google is still picking this up as duplicate content. The real solution would be to have your front page slightly change the titles, and instead of the first paragraph, parse the posts and output them in some different format. Ex: pick up the first line of every paragraph in your post and present them in bullet form, or use your imagination and come up with your own solution.  But again, I think it’s too much worrying over nothing.