Category Archives: Computers and Software

Edit First, Check Later

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium The world is awash with software designed to improve your writing, and this software can be particularly valuable to editors. Here are some of the current contenders: PerfectIt from IntelligentEditing Lingofy Scribendi ProWritingAid WordTune Hemingway WhiteSmoke Ginger Sapling SlickWrite LanguageTool SentenceCheckup Linguix AfterTheDeadline OnlineCorrection Antidote GrammarCheck But good grief, how […]

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Getting a Bird’s-Eye View on Your Document

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium Back in the days of editing on paper, I would sometimes spread manuscript pages out on my desk to get a bird’s-eye view of the text I was working on. This could be useful for several reasons: To see if long stretches of text needed to be broken down into […]

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Lyonizing Word: Before Typesetting

by Jack Lyon I need your help, Gentle Reader. I need your ideas. Back in 1996, when I started selling Microsoft Word add-ins at the Editorium, getting a Word document into QuarkXPress was tricky: Quark was prone to crashes and didn’t handle footnotes at all. To solve these problems, I created QuarkConverter, and NoteStripper. A few […]

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Lyonizing Word: Inside Notes

by Jack Lyon As useful as they are, Microsoft Word’s footnotes and endnotes are amazingly easy to mess up. Let’s look at some ways that can happen — and how to fix the problems. First, we need to open a document that has footnotes — or make one. Then, to really see what’s going on, […]

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Lyonizing Word: Using the “Find What Expression” Wildcard

by Jack Lyon Rich Adin recently sent me an interesting challenge. He was using his EditTools Journal feature to mark journal titles in references. The power behind that useful tool comes from lists of incorrectly styled references with corresponding correctly styled references. He creates a separate list for each reference style. The list he sent me […]

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Lyonizing Word: But Which Styles?

Which paragraph styles do you want to use? If you’re writing a simple business letter, the only style you may need is Word’s default of Normal. But if you’re editing a book, things immediately become much more complicated. Consider: What different kinds of text exist in a book?

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Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word

Styles are very useful. The problem is that Microsoft Word, in its usual “helpful” way, tries to manage which styles are available, in which document, and how those styles can be accessed. Finally growing tired of this nonsense, I decided to take the matter firmly in hand by writing this article, with the intent to solve the problems as I do so.

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Lyonizing Word: Why Computers?

by Jack Lyon Dan A. Wilson, of The Editor’s Desktop, once advised editors that a computer is “far and away your most valuable tool, your ultimate enabler, your brain’s second-in-command. A brain with a pencil in its hand cannot compete — indeed, cannot even credibly challenge — a brain with a computer and computer-sophistication at […]

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Lyonizing Word: Secrets of the Ribbon

There are secrets to using Word’s Ribbon interface. In this essay, we explore a few of them.

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Lyonizing Word: But Wait—There’s More!

Microsoft Word’s find and replace features can do an awful lot — much more than you might think. Do you know about the options? “Ignore punctuation characters” and “Ignore white-space characters,” for example, can be very useful in editing. Being able to find and replace formatting is essential, especially when using styles. And using Word’s built-in codes lets you search for all kinds of things (graphics, page breaks, dashes, and so on) that would otherwise require more advanced techniques (like wildcards and numeric codes). In other words, Microsoft Word’s basic find and replace features aren’t so basic — at least not in what they can do!

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