Quote, Unquote

If you've read many past issues of this newsletter, you know that I loathe Word's AutoFormat options, although I do use one of them--"Replace straight quotes with smart quotes." But sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I can't insert a quotation mark going the right direction. If I want a closing quotation mark, Word insists on giving me an opening one--or vice versa. If you've run into this problem, you know how maddening it can be. Wouldn't it be nice to type precisely the kind of "smart" quotation marks you need without having Word second-guess what you're doing? It turns out there's a built-in way to do that. Here are the key commands you need:

OPENING DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

To get an opening double quotation mark, press this key combination:

CTRL + `

(That little character on the end there is the single quotation mark on the key to the left of the "1" key on your keyboard.)

Next, press this:

SHIFT + '

(That little character on the end is an apostrophe. In other words, just type a quotation mark as you usually would.)

There's your opening double quotation mark.

CLOSING DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

To get a closing double quotation mark, press this:

CTRL + '

Then press this:

SHIFT + '

OPENING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

To get an opening single quotation mark, press this:

CTRL + `

Then press this:

CLOSING SINGLE QUOTATION MARK

To get an closing single quotation mark, press this:

CTRL + '

Then press this:

Now that I've told you all of that, I've got to say that I don't much like those key combinations. They're hard to type, and they seem inconsistent. Luckily, Word allows us to create our own key combinations, so let's try setting up a more natural and consistent system:

1. Click Insert > Symbol > Symbols tab.

2. Make sure the "Font" list shows "(normal text)."

3. Make sure the "Subset" list shows "General Punctuation."

On the bottom row in the fifth column, you'll see an opening single quotation mark.

In the sixth column, you'll see a closing single quotation mark.

In the ninth column, you'll see an opening double quotation mark

And in the tenth column, you'll see a closing double quotation mark.

Now let's assign some keys:

1. Click the opening single quotation mark.

2. Click the "Shortcut Key" button.

3. Press the new key combination you want to use. I'm thinking this one:

CTRL + '

4. Click the "Assign" button.

5. Click the "Close" button.

While we're still in there, let's assign the rest of the quotation marks. To do so, repeat steps 1 through 5 for each quotation mark. Here are the other key combinations I'm going to use:

For the closing single quotation mark: ALT + '

For the opening double quotation mark: SHIFT + CTRL + '

For the closing double quotation mark: SHIFT + ALT + '

When you're finished, press that final "Close" button to put away the "Symbol" dialog.

That should do it. Note that you can continue to use Word's AutoFormat quotation marks if you want. But when you need to, you can easily specify exactly the kind of quotation marks you need to use.

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READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article "Style by Microsoft," quite a few readers sent additional Microsoft "style" nominations for our "hall of shame." Many thanks to all of them!

Kenneth Sutton wrote:

Here's my nomination of the "replace internet paths with hyperlinks". Bah!

In a similar vein, India Amos noted:

How about this classic: e-mail addresses underlined (not to mention blue and hotlinked). Yecch! Have you ever _deliberately_ clicked a linked e-mail address in a Word file? Me neither.

Finally, Andrea Balinson wrote:

The "style by Microsoft" example that drives me crazy is "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks," which makes Web addresses appear underlined in blue. It's one thing if the document you're writing is designed to be read on a computer; in that case, having URLs as hyperlinks can actually be useful. Most of the time, though, I see printed letters, memos, and other paper materials in which the URLs are underlined -- obviously because whoever created the documents didn't know or care enough to stop Word from formatting them as links.

LeAnne Baird wrote:

Here's my pet grammar-spelling peeve:

If you don't know that 'til is a contraction of until, Microsoft spell checker only gives you till as an option, not till and 'til. What would it cost them to fix this? .00000000000001 per licensed copy.

Caryl Wenzel wrote:

I have complained many a time of "style" imposed by Microsoft that is not accepted in an editorial style manual. Yet, someone at Microsoft thinks he or she is doing someone a favor by providing all these so-called helpful ideas.

I routinely omit such formatting and follow traditional editorial guidelines. I just wish Microsoft would learn the same. In fact, even Microsoft publishes it own style manuals for the books its publishing arm produces, and many of these imposed styles are not allowed.

Peg Hausman wrote:

My pet peeve about Word's "help" is its default enforcement of the alleged rule against using "which" to introduce a restrictive (essential) clause in a sentence. I've appended a longish e-mail (below) that I sent to a local electronic discussion group a while back explaining why the rule doesn't hold water. But the short version is that it was originally simply a mild preference expressed by H. W. Fowler in his famous _Modern English Usage_ (1926). The preference got picked up by AP and was soon presented as grammatical gospel, reproducing itself via journalism teachers all over the United States, in spite of the fact that it fails to reflect most normal educated usage.

Redmond has picked up this fiction and incorporated it into its Grammar function. Type a sentence like "The only document which really mattered was the one they neglected to send" into Word, and it will put the well-known wavy green underline under the fourth through the sixth words. A couple of investigative clicks will get you this message:

"If the marked group of words is essential to the meaning of your sentence, use 'that' to introduce the group of words. Do not use a comma. If the words are not essential to the meaning of your sentence, use "which" and separate them with a comma."

I have two problems with this. One is that it is too dogmatic: If MS wants to help people abide by AP (and AP-influenced) rules, that's fine, but it should be noted as a matter of AP house style and not as law.

The other problem is that a lot of people won't get as far as the second click, so won't know what the wavy green line is about. They may, however, discover through experiment that adding a couple of commas will make the wavy green line go away. I've seen quite a number of restrictive clauses incorrectly garnished with commas for this reason, and the effect can be most confusing. If you add commas to the sentence above--"The only document, which really mattered, was the one they neglected to send"--it promptly sounds witless and absurd.

As noted below, there's a longer discussion at this URL:

I'm afraid even the abbreviated polemic in this e-mail may be too long for you to use [Editor's note: Not at all. It's fascinating!], but in any case, thanks for the chance to cast my vote against a really annoying Wordism!

-------- Included Message --------

Subject: Re: [dcpubs] Which old which? The wicked which!

DATE: 09/03/2003 12:00:00 PM

From: Peg Hausman

To: DCPubs mailing list

References: <1a5.d64a18a.2b279f11 [at symbol] aol.com> <3DF646D8.2050704@cox.net>

Failure to observe the which/that distinction doesn't reflect evolution of any sort, for the simple reason that it has never at any time been a normal rule of English.

Apparently we owe the rise of the which/that rule to Fowler's _Modern English Usage_ (1926). Fowler mentions that some writers seem to follow a practice of using "which" only for non-restrictive clauses, and says he thinks it would be a good idea. But he certainly doesn't present it as a law of the language, current or past: "Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or of the best writers."

In fact, a couple of centuries earlier the feeling was that "that" was a rather dubious pronoun, best avoided by careful writers. Here's part of a thumbnail history of which/that from the _Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage_:

_That_ is our oldest relative pronoun. According to McKnight 1928 _that_ was prevalent in early Middle English, _which_ began to be used as a relative pronoun in the 14th century, and _who_ and _whom_ in the 15th. _That_ was used not only to introduce restrictive clauses, but also nonrestrictive ones. . . .

By the early 17th century, _which_ and _that_ were being used pretty much interchangeably. . . . During the later 17th century, . . . _that_ fell into disuse, at least in literary English. It went into such an eclipse that its reappearance in the early 18th century was noticed and satirized by Joseph Addison in _The Spectator_ (30 May 1711) in a piece entitled 'Humble Petition of _Who_ and _Which_ against the upstart Jack Sprat _That_.'

Unfortunately, Fowler's "it would be nice" notion about keeping "which" nonrestrictive was apparently picked up by someone at AP and incorporated into the AP stylebook. As a result, professors at journalism schools across the land started teaching the which/that rule as gospel, and editors influenced by AP style have been trying to impose it on the general public ever since. It's in quite a number of stylebooks now. The only hitch is that it has never made it into the common language--not only of those who barely made it through English 101 but even of the professionally literate. As the _Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage_ noted in 1989:

If the discussions in many of the handbooks are complex and burdened with exceptions, the facts of usage are quite simple. Virginia McDavid's 1977 study shows that about 75 percent of the instances of _which_ in edited prose introduce restrictive clauses; about 25 percent, nonrestrictive ones.

We conclude that at the end of the 20th century, the usage of _which_ and _that_ --at least in prose--has pretty much settled down. You can use either _which_ or _that_ to introduce a restrictive clause--the grounds for your choice should be stylistic--and _which_ to introduce a nonrestrictive clause.

Please look at Ms. McDavid's figures again: "which" introduced restrictive clauses *three times as often* as it introduced non-restrictive ones, in *edited* prose. Read a few novels by good, sensitive authors, and note the same pattern. Listen to intelligent people talking, and note the same pattern. In trying to browbeat the US at large (forget the UK) into observing the which/that "rule," we're tilting at windmills, spitting into the wind, beating our heads against the wall, trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon, and otherwise wasting our precious time.

A perverse recent development is that our buddies at Microsoft have incorporated the rule into their grammar-checking software. As a result, people who have no notion of the rule are mystified by seeing wiggly green lines underneath sentences that look just fine to them. On experimenting, some of them find that adding a couple of commas makes the green lines go away. The result is mispunctuated restrictive clauses ("the product, which drew the most attention at the inventors' show, was the autopiloted heat-seeking mousetrap. . ."), surely a worse plague than the original alleged problem.

I agree that it would be a nice rule if it existed in a linguistically meaningful sense. There are, in fact, a lot of things on my wish list for the English language, including a decent spelling system and a genuine gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, but wishing won't make it so.

There's a long but interesting discussion of the issue at

I think the remarks by Jane Lyle in this posting, in particular, are dead on (she's managing editor of Indiana University Press and one of the mavens of copyediting-l). Or just look at very thorough treatment of the question in the _Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage_. (I'm forever recommending this book and hope I'm not too monotonous about it, but I do think leaves all other usage guides in the dust.)

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RESOURCES

Garbl's Writing Center

Garbl (Gary B. Larson) provides a free editorial style manual, an annotated directory of writing Web sites, a concise writing guide, and a personalized advice and writing forum. Lots of good stuff for writers and editors:

http://garbl.home.comcast.net/

Style by Microsoft

Recently a colleague said to me, "Look at this manuscript. All the ordinal numbers are superscripted." What he meant was that "1st," "2nd," "3rd," and so on had the "st," "nd," and "rd" in superscript. Then came an interesting question: "Do you think I should leave them that way?"

Now, I don't know about you, but I've never in my life been tempted to set ordinals with superscript, so my answer was basically "Are you kidding?" Later I started thinking about where the superscripts had come from: Microsoft Word's AutoFormat feature. And that led me to ponder a broader question: Are editors beginning to let Microsoft Word dictate editorial style?

It's tempting here to get off on a discussion of how the means of production influences the things produced, but instead may I just say that if we let Word dictate editorial style, we're in trouble. In my opinion, such "helpful" features as AutoFormat were created mainly as one more whizbang feature for Microsoft's marketing staff. The value to everyday users is negligible or worse. So I thought it might be helpful to identify "style by Microsoft" items to watch out for. Here's my list:

* The aforementioned superscript ordinals. You can learn how to turn off such items here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1700237543

* Superscript note numbers in footnotes and endnotes. You can learn how to change these to regular numbers here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703696660

* Automatic capitalization of articles, conjunctions, and prepositions when using Format > Change Case > Title Case. Our Editor's ToolKit program solves this problem with its "Make selection title case" feature. You can learn more about Editor's ToolKit here:

http://www.editorium.com/14857.htm

* Opening single quotation marks rather than apostrophes. For example, if I write "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves," I want the character in front of the "T" to be an apostrophe, not an opening single quotation mark. Our FileCleaner program (also included with Editor's ToolKit Plus) will correct most such problems:

http://www.editorium.com/14845.htm

* The tiny, ugly ellipses "character" (ASCII number 133 on PC, 201 on Macintosh). Brrr. If you need ellipses, properly spaced periods look vastly better. Again, FileCleaner will fix the problem.

* Arial and Times New Roman. Everywhere I look, I see documents with headings in Arial and text in Times New Roman. Just because Microsoft uses these fonts as its default doesn't mean *you* have to. Go ahead, modify the styles in your Normal template. Be different! Be daring! Be tasteful!

Have you noticed other examples of "style by Microsoft"? If so, please let me know, and I'll include your nominations in next week's newsletter:

mailto:editor [at symbol] editorium.com

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RESOURCES

For more on Word's annoying eccentricities and how to turn them off, see Elizabeth Burton's article here:

http://www.simegen.com/school/business/manuscriptpreparation/taketioff.html

Also, if you haven't already done so, be sure to check out Jean Hollis Weber's book Taming Microsoft Word 2002. It's a great resource, well worth the modest price:

http://www.jeanweber.com/books/tameword.htm

Indexing in the Dark

Microsoft Word uses what's known among professional indexers as "embedded indexing." That means the index entries are placed as codes in the text of the document being indexed. Then, later, the codes are used to generate the index automatically. (You can learn more about using Word's indexing features by searching for "Index" in Word's Help file.)

Embedded indexing offers one big advantage over traditional indexing: if your pagination changes (for whatever reason), you can easily regenerate the index with fresh, new page numbers for all the entries.

But embedded indexing also has a big *disadvantage* over traditional indexing: there's no way to see your entries in alphabetical order or even in one place, so it's like working in the dark. In books with many pages (the kind I tend to get), this is a real problem. For example, I may make an entry for "Gandhi, Mohandas" on page 300, not remembering my earlier entry for "Gandhi, Mahatma" on page 30. That means my index will need lots of editing after it's been generated.

Until I release my super-duper indexing program (patience, patience), you can alleviate the problem somewhat by opening your document in two windows at once, scrolling to the bottom of the second window, generating your index, and using the index for reference as you create more entries in the first window. Here's the procedure:

1. Open the document you want to index.

2. Place your cursor in some text where you want to insert an index entry.

3. Click Insert > Index and Tables > Index > Mark Entry. (In Word 2002, click Insert > Reference > Index and Tables > Index > Mark Entry.)

4. Type in your main entry, a subentry, and any other information you want to include.

5. Click the Mark button. If you like, you can enter more index entries for the same text selection, clicking the Mark button for each one. When you're finished, click the Close button.

6. Repeat steps 2 through 5 to create a few additional entries.

7. Open your document in a new window by clicking Window > New Window.

8. Click Window > Arrange All to put one Window at the top of your screen and the other at the bottom. If you have our Editor's ToolKit program, click Windows > Arrange Documents to place the windows side by side--or arrange them that way by hand.

9. Place your cursor in the second window and press CTRL + END to go to the end of the document.

10. Click Insert > Index and Tables > Index > OK to generate the (unfinished) index. (In Word 2002, click Insert > Reference > Index and Tables > Index > OK.)

11. Place your cursor in the first window and insert some more index entries.

12. Go back to the second window and update the index (so you can see your new entries in place) by placing your cursor in the index, clicking the right mouse button, and clicking "Update Field." On a big book with lots of entries, this may take several seconds. (On my not-so-fast computer, a 500-page document with 2,400 entries took 45 seconds to update.)

13. Repeat steps 11 and 12 as needed.

This is far from being the perfect solution to the problems of embedded indexing, but at least it will keep you from having to work completely in the dark.

If you like the idea of automatically arranging windows side by side, you can learn more about Editor's ToolKit here:

http://www.editorium.com/14857.htm

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READERS WRITE

Word guru Steve Hudson sent some useful tips for indexing with a concordance. Thanks, Steve!

Ya know Jack over at The Editorium, right? Well he and I have two completely different approaches to indexing. Yet some of the fringe bits are compatible. However, we both get the job done.

He is making tools for helping hand-build an index. I am making tools for helping clean up a concordance approach. Neither does the job properly without a skilled hand guiding them.

That having been said, naturally I have a heretical stance on the whole thing. This is an abridged and appended version of a longer yack I had with a writer up in the mountains last weekend. She is working on cleaning up my Word Spellbook. I've barely started indexing because there is more dump left. This is also the exact same issue I face doing up development documentation: there is always more to add, and that added stuff needs to be indexed like the old stuff.

Quicker, Easier Indexing by Subtraction

How to Use a Concordance File and Still Produce a Decent Index

The Heretic's Hack 'n' Slash Method of Indexing

Note key terms on the way by indexing them. It's just as easy to mark all as to mark one. Keep on developing away. Time for a minor, internal release. Update yer dynamic index. Copy it to a new doc, flatten it with ctrl+shift+f9 and be clever with find and replace wildcards to blow away numbering, leaving terms ready for use in a concordance file. This then re-performs "mark all" on all your entries.

This works great for getting a good start together. First you review for addition. Get all new terms in there. Either index them all or add them to the concordance. Do this until you are satisfied all key terms have been identified. Search out used synonyms and either kill them or add them to the index. Etc. Hunter-gatherer mode.

Then you review by subtraction, accountancy-management style. If it ain't important, slash it from your budget. During your passes, you marked separate instances of your word stems:

Finding

Find

Finder

Found

Searching

Time to rationalise, quickly. Use find and replace to do the dirty work for you el pronto! I am planning to help this part with a macro to do stem matching and an interface for hand-matching synonyms and keeping that information in select peer-shared databases. Technically speaking, you can insert HERETIC-NOT-nnnnn bookmarks with the same range as spurious concordance artefacts for future proofing, and auto-expand multiple similar references based on a sliding log scale of the distance of the inference--but that's a while off yet.

This leaves you with a poor index. Now you do the stuff that good "hand" indexers do as part of their addition process that you've missed, which is pretty simple by now. Simply scan through the text looking at your index field placements. Forget the words themselves; we're beyond words now, we're being artistic.

Let's imagine that every major subject in the index is a colour. If it's a small range, it's a saturated strong colour; if it's a large range, it's pale. Synonyms are varying shades of that colour. This is badly implemented by a simple macro I wrote ages ago to highlight index entries. (Highlight doesn't have a custom color range.)

If I look at a document from a chapter perspective, I see a rainbow of the base colours with colour boundaries being clearly defined. I zoom in to section level. I see the base colour for that chapter and some interesting hues from cross-over colours where index entries straddle colour boundaries for their multiple relationships. Thickens the spectrum right out for that colour. Some sparkling of other colours is also starting to show.

I zoom in to topic level. Surprisingly at this level, from what we've seen above, the base hue is quite pale. A kaleidoscope of colours of all shades is present. Well, at least it SHOULD be, but it probably isn't if we've just finished the sluggo approach I outlined.

What you will have is lots of strong shades and no pale ones. So, we look at the patterns in front of us. Seas of white are either bad and need rectifying or they are long references or graphical content.

Pale shades should feature regularly and will generally be of the hue of the section. However, there should be patches of pale contrasting colour as well, otherwise our index is just a TOC and is useless. A tint of every colour should be represented, somehow, everywhere in a section.

If you see clusters of the strong colours, you need to smudge them and make them paler. Don't let areas of the same shade sit beside each other; make them paler and covering the whole area.

On a real-world level this means looking behind the words still for meta-concepts that flow from areas as well as ensuring your master : slave pairings are suitable and a good whack of 'em represented richly.

Indeed, it is possible even to try a network theory approach. The words themselves are scale free, but we don't index them all. Major word hubs are trivials. We try and deal with any minor hubs by clever document structures (TOC) rather than the index, yet still have power terms with many sub-entries. The index picks up the lesser nodes of interest. Log(references) x log(incidences) wouldn't be a straight line. References x incidences would be closer to a flat line. I'm sure there's an existing work that's been done on it somewhere 🙂

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RESOURCES

After reading today's article, you may want to know more about where to get help with embedded indexing in Word. If so, check out the WordIndexers discussion group. The group description reads, "Indexers who use Word for embedded indexing will find support, tips, tricks, and a safe place to scream in frustration."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WordIndexers/