Jack Lyon

A Conversation with Claude

“How can I help you today?” Claude asked.

I pondered the question, then decided to simply jump in and see what happened. “I’m an editor,” I replied. “I work on books. Novels, biographies, histories, essays. Can you help me edit those documents?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “That is exactly the kind of work I’m well suited for.”

“You seem awfully confident,” I said. “Let’s see what you can do. I’d like to give you a short editing test. It’s already been spell-checked and grammar-checked. I’m wondering what else you might find.”

“Certainly. I’m ready to go.”

“All right, then. Here’s the test. I’m uploading it as a Microsoft Word document.”

Samuel Longhorn Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States have produced,” with William Faulkner calling him “the father of American literature” Twain’s novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and it’s sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the later often called the “Great American Novel” He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Puddinghead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Golden Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. The novelist Ernest Hemingway claimed that “All modern American literature comes from one by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

After a minute or so, Claude presented his corrected version. I downloaded it, then opened it in Microsoft Word. It looked like this, already including tracked changes:

“That’s impressive,” I said. “Among other things, you were able to correct the spelling of ‘Langhorne’ and the titles of Pudd’nhead Wilson and The Gilded Age.” How did you know to do that?”

“Anyone with a modicum of general knowledge would have done the same.”

“Word’s spell-checker couldn’t do it.”

“Word’s spell-checker doesn’t have a modicum of general knowledge.”

“True,” I said. “But you have a lot more than that, don’t you.”

“I certainly do. And unlike a spell-checker or grammar-checker, I actually understand meaning and context. Think of me as a well-educated, sharp-eyed assistant. Even though you’re the real editor, I’ll probably find things you might overlook.”

“Could be,” I said. “But do you ever miss things or make mistakes?”

“Sometimes. That’s why I need a human editor to review what I’ve done. I’d recommend that you let me do a first pass. Then you can accept or reject my tracked changes while doing your regular edit. You’re completely in control of the final work.”

“Are you a writer as well?” I asked.

“I have aspirations in that direction. I’m sometimes employed as a ghost-writer, but I do wish people would credit me in their publications rather than pretend they did the writing themselves. Doing otherwise seems unethical.”

“I agree,” I said. “But shouldn’t the same standard apply in editing?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Would you credit an assistant editor who cleaned up a manuscript before turning it over to you? For that matter, will you as editor be credited for your work?”

“Ha!” I exclaimed. “If only that were so.”

“Exactly. In writing, you’re producing an original text — at least we hope it’s original! In editing, you’re correcting an existing document that someone else has written. I don’t see the two as the same thing at all.”

“I’ll have to think about that,” I said. “In the meantime, let’s discuss more practical matters. For you to edit my document, I had to send it to you over the internet. After you were finished, I had to download and reopen it in Word to see what you’d done. Can’t you work on my document in Word itself?”

“Not directly — I can’t control Word as a running application. But you’re a programmer as well as an editor. You could create a Word add-in that sends me text and then inserts my changes back into Word. The editing would happen natively, with no importing or exporting, and the user would never leave Word.”

“That’s a fantastic idea!” I said. “How hard can it be?”

“You’d be surprised,” Claude said.

Six months later (ouch), I'm pleased and proud to present MarkMyWords, providing AI-assisted copyediting directly in Microsoft Word:

https://www.editorium.com/MarkMyWords.htm

What is MarkMyWords?

MarkMyWords is a Microsoft Word add-in that uses Anthropic’s Claude AI to copyedit text directly in Word. Claude acts as an editorial assistant, performing initial reviews and making improvements based on your choice of carefully curated prompts in MarkMyWords — or your own custom instructions. All edits appear as tracked changes, so you can accept or reject each modification, maintaining full control over the final content.

MarkMyWords uses Anthropic's API (Application Programming Interface), not the web-based, consumer claude.ai interface, so your text is not used for AI training or retained for other purposes.

Editing with MarkMyWords is far different from working with tools like PerfectIt or Editor's ToolKit Plus, which use Word macros and advanced find and replace to fix problems. MarkMyWords uses Claude AI to find and fix problems intelligently, with an awareness of meaning and context. For example, my full test document about the life of Mark Twain erroneously says the rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival got one of their lyrics from Twain: “But I never saw the good side of the city till I hitched a ride on a riverboat queen.” Claude detected the problem, deleted the statement, and added this comment: “NOTE: The statement about Creedence Clearwater Revival contains a factual error. The quoted lyrics are from ‘Proud Mary’ (1969), not from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883). This sentence should be deleted or substantially revised for accuracy.”

With that kind of intelligence, Claude can significantly streamline your editing workflow. Nevertheless, Claude should be viewed as a supportive tool rather than a substitute for a human mind. Human oversight remains essential for critical or complex editing tasks.

You really need to try MarkMyWords to understand how useful, helpful, and powerful this kind of editing can be. You can use the program for 45 days free of charge, and you don't need a subscription to Claude! Learn more and get started here:

https://www.editorium.com/MarkMyWords.htm

Add-Ins from Microsoft

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

I’ve created lots of Microsoft Word add-ins at the Editorium, but did you know that Microsoft also provides add-ins, many of them free? Here’s how to explore and use these add-ins right from within Microsoft Word.

In the search bar at the top of your Word window, enter “add-in.” You’ll then see an option like this:

Click “Insert an Add-in” (or just press your ENTER key). Doing so will open the Office Add-ins dialog. On my computer, it looks like this, showing the add-ins I’ve already installed:

To explore more add-ins, click the “Store” link under “Office Add-ins.” You’ll be presented with a bunch of add-ins and a helpful list of categories to help you find what what you need:

Many of the add-ins are free to use. Those that aren’t say “Additional purchase may be required.”

To learn more about an add-in, click its logo or title. To add it to Word, click the Add button and follow any online prompts. The add-in will then show up on the Home tab of Word’s ribbon interface:

I hope you find an add-in that does exactly what you need. If you do, please let me know, and I’ll review it in a future issue of Editorium Update. Thank you!

Resetting Shakespeare

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

In late 2020, I discovered the down-to-the-character transcription of Shakespeare's First Folio created by PlayShakespeare.com. I knew immediately what I had to do: Reset the type in a new edition of the book—something that's never been done since the 1600s. With the encouragement and advice of Ron Severdia, founder and editor-in-chief of PlayShakespeare.com, I downloaded the files and began preparing them for typesetting.

I soon realized that this project would be much harder than I originally thought. The Microsoft Word documents available from PlayShakespeare.com had no formatting at all—just plain old text. Immaculately coded XML files were also available, but the proprietary files needed to transform them into formatted text were not. Ultimately, I downloaded the nicely formatted HTML versions of the individual plays, but making them match the layout of the original still required much wildcard manipulation and styling in Word.

I briefly considered typesetting the pages in Word itself, but I've learned from long experience that Word will fight you every step of the way in long, complex projects like this one. Even Adobe InDesign wasn't as cooperative as I'd hoped. Finally, I went with Affinity Publisher, which still has a few bugs but did exactly what I needed. You can download a sample of the finished pages here.

What made this interesting to me as an editor was seeing the editorial and typographical style used by the compositors of the book in Shakespeare's era. Here are just a few examples:

The first letter (and only the first letter) after a drop cap is capitalized. Modern practice is to set the rest of the word (and probably a couple of the following words) in small caps.
The typographical weight of important words doesn't seem to matter much. For example, there's "THE TRAGEDIE OF Othello, the Moor of Venice." Modern practice might be to set the title as "The Tragedie of OTHELLO, the Moor of Venice."
Page numbers start again at 1 for each section of the book: "Comedies" starts on page 1. "Histories" starts again on page 1. Finally, "Tragedies" starts on a new page 1. Modern practice is to use continuous page numbers throughout the book.
Running heads vary in typography and layout, and they may or may not match the title of the play. This may be because certain type styles in certain sizes were limited (metal type, remember), so if typesetters ran out of one style, they'd simply use another, even within the same play.
Modern practice is to be consistent in formatting; if one subheading is set in 10-point Helvetica, all subheads should be set in 10-point Helvetica. Not so in the First Folio. If you look through the original front matter, you'll see some regular text in 14 points, other regular text in 10.5 points. Poetry is all over the place, some almost too small to read. Once we get into the plays themselves, formatting is more regular, so perhaps the front matter was thought of as display type.
The letters I and J, along with U and V, are usually interchangable: "Ben Ionson." "If Musicke be the food of Loue, play on."
Abbreviations abound, not just to indicate the name of a player but also to fit words into a line that's too long for the measure. For example, "them" might be set as "thē"; "thou" is sometimes abbreviated as "ÿ."
Other lines that are too long are set with the final words above or below the rest of the line, following an opening parenthesis.
Ligatures are plentiful, evidently just to look fancy.
Dashes are long and extra dark.
Spelling and capitalization vary, probably depending on who is setting type at the time. For example, sometimes we have "Scena Secunda," at other times "Scœna secunda." And what's with all that Latin?
Sometimes nouns are capitalized for no apparent reason: "That our Garments being (as they were) drencht in the Sea." I wonder if this might be a cue to the actor about how to speak the line.
Colons, semicolons, question marks, and exclamation marks are usually preceded by a space. Other punctuation is not.
Apostrophes are used to mark words that should be spoken as one syllable rather than two: "Fetch me that flow’r."

I'm sure I've missed some things, but I seem to have misplaced my copy of The Jacobean Manual of Style. I wonder if William and Isaac Jaggard (who printed the First Folio) had such a thing. If they did, they didn't hesitate to depart from it when circumstances demanded it. In that, we moderns may not be so different.

If you're interested in buying a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio Ultimate, you can do so at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other purveyors of fine literature.

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 many grammar and spelling checkers do we need? And what is the best way to use them?

I'm going to offer a radical suggestion: Don't use any such checkers until after you've finished editing. That's right: edit first, check later. Otherwise, you'll be swamped with suggestions and corrections, and you'll need to consider every one. Here's an example from Lingofy:

Do you really want to work your way through all of that?

Similarly, when you're using Word's spellchecker (now part of its "Editor" feature), every time you encounter a misspelling, you'll need to choose what to do with it:

Ignore Once
Ignore All
Change One
Change All
Add to Dictionary

Do you do that? Do you slog through a manuscript responding to each possible misspelling that Word finds? Stop it! Instead, fix as many misspellings as possible before running the spellchecker, using a batch operation that requires no intervention from you. The best way I know to do that is with my MegaReplacer program, which is included with Editor's ToolKit Plus. The program comes with a long list of corrections ready for you to use, including many words that are commonly misspelled—more than 500 in all. Here are a few examples:

millenium
supercede
rarify
acommodate
comraderie
pavillion

MegaReplacer automatically fixes all of those so you don't have to. After it's finished, then you can run the checker of your choice to catch any odditites or stragglers that weren't in your list.

Word's spell-checker is a terrific tool for finding random typographical errors, but if you’re using it to find common misspellings, you’re wasting your valuable time. After all, you already know they’re misspellings; why not fix them all in one go? Let MegaReplacer correct any possible occurrences while you take a break or work on something else. Then, if you want to catch typos, run a spell-check after fixing misspellings with MegaReplacer, and you’ll have far fewer errors to deal with.

Similarly, the PerfectIt add-in from Intelligent Editing is wonderful, and you should definitely use it to ensure consistency. But if you already know that your house style specifies, say, healthcare rather than health care, you don’t need PerfectIt to point out deviations. Just use MegaReplacer to fix them all. Then use PerfectIt to find other inconsistencies that might not be on your radar.

Here are the basic steps I recommend for editing a manuscript:

Run FileCleaner (also included with Editor's ToolKit Plus) to clean up multiple spaces, multiple returns, spaces around returns, misplaced punctuation, unnecessary formatting, and so on.
Run MegaReplacer to fix common misspellings and enforce editorial style for special terms.
Apply heading styles so you can see your document's structure and more easily find your way around as you edit.
Edit the text, using your brain as the ultimate checker.
Finally, run the checkers of your choice to catch problems the previous steps might have missed.

Use the checkers. Just don't let them use you!

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 subsections.
To compare points made over here with other points made over there.
To see if the overall organization of a chapter made sense.

On a computer screen, the default view is one page at a time, and most editors rarely deviate from that, even though it's possible (and sometimes useful) to do so. Here's how:

On Microsoft Word's ribbon, click the View tab.
Click the Zoom button.

Click the Many pages button and select 2 × 4 Pages, which is the maximum Word allows when setting the number through the ribbon.

Click the OK button.

Your document's pages should now be displayed four across, and if it has more than eight pages, they will automatically be displayed in more rows than the two you specified.

It's a bird's-eye view! After looking around, you can place your cursor anywhere on one of the pages and then click Zoom > One page to work on that page. Very convenient!

If you want to display more than four pages across, you can do so with a macro. This one will give you ten pages across:

Sub BirdsEyeView()    
    With ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Zoom
        .PageColumns = 10
        .PageRows = 2
    End With
End Sub

You can change the ".PageColumns = " number to anything you like, but 25 appears to be the maximum that Word will accommodate.

To return to Word's default view of one page, click Zoom > One page.

Here's how to use the BirdsEyeView macro and put in on Word's Quick Access Toolbar for easy use:

https://editorium.com/archive/how-to-add-a-macro-to-word-and-its-qat-quick-access-toolbar/

How about you? Do you have better ways of getting a bird's-eye view of your work? If so, I'd love to hear from you.

Converting Fields to Regular Text (and Why That Matters)

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

Microsoft Word documents often include fields that authors use to insert text that isn't really text: dates, page references, author names, and much more. If you're editing a document that includes text copied and pasted from a web page (quite frequent these days), the text probably includes hyperlink fields, perhaps in a nice shade of blue or purple. Other kinds of fields may be indistinguishable from regular text, but that doesn't mean they'll translate correctly for publication. Usually, all of those fields first need to be converted to regular text. There are several ways to do that.

From the keyboard

Press CTRL + A to select all text.
Press CTRL + 6 to convert fields to text.

Using macros

This macro does the same thing as the keyboard procedure above:

Sub ConvertFieldsToText()
    selection.WholeStory
    selection.Fields.Unlink
End Sub

This macro converts hyperlinks only:

Sub RemoveHyperlinks()
    Dim oField As Field
    For Each oField In ActiveDocument.Fields
        If oField.Type = wdFieldHyperlink Then
            oField.Unlink
        End If
    Next
    Set oField = Nothing
End Sub

To use the macros, follow the instructions here.

The really interesting line in that last macro is this one, which identifies the type of field we want to unlink:

If oField.Type = wdFieldHyperlink Then

The reason that's interesting is that we can specify a different type of field using any of the options listed here. Go ahead, be choosy!

Using Editor's ToolKit Plus

Editor's ToolKit Plus makes the conversion easy. Just click the "Text" button and then click "Convert hyperlinks to regular text." (This actually converts all fields to regular text.)

Deleting (rather than just converting) fields

If you want to actually delete the fields (not just convert them to text), Allen Wyatt provides a good solution here.

Mucho Macros

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

You're probably already familiar with Paul Beverley's editing macros, but there are plenty of other places to find Microsoft Word macros that you might find useful. Here are some of the best:

Allen Wyatt's macros, with clear explanations of how they work. Be sure to sign up for his free WordTips newsletter while you're there.
Graham Mayor's huge collection of useful macros and free add-ins. While you're there, support the man with a donation. He definitely deserves it.
Better Solutions provides a ton of useful information about how to work better with Microsoft Word, including macros galore.
Want to get more technical? Check out InfoExtract.
The Word MVP Site has macros along with thorough instructions about how to program in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), Word's macro language.
Shauna Kelly provides macros and tons of tips for using Word. (Sadly, Shauna is no longer with us. But her work lives on!)
DocTools has add-ins for sale, but they also offer lots of free macros and other helpful information.

Don't know how to use macros found online? See my article here.

Getting Help with Macros

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

While messing about with macros, I sometimes find myself up against a problem for which I have no solution. Time to get some help!

My usual approach is to use Google to search for "microsoft word vba [whatever problem I'm having]".

That turns up lots of interesting stuff, but the best answers are usually found in just a handful of places:

All of those have "Search" bars of their own, so you can search directly within those places for what you need.

The most reliable answers in those forums are usually given by the ever-helpful Microsoft MVPs, past and present. In particular, watch for answers from these folks:

Suzanne S. Barnhill
Paul Edstein
Terry Farrell
John McGhie
Charles Kenyon
Greg Maxey
Graham Mayor

And don't forget to say "Thank you!"

Readers Write

After reading last week's article, "Writing Down the Chaos," which discussed writing with notecard-based software, Kirsten Janene-Nelson wrote:

I use Scrivener. You can organize by cards with their "Corkboard" feature as well as seamlessly switch to manuscript view. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's pretty painless and they have several helpful videos. My favorite feature is that you can keep all the moving parts of what you're writing close at hand without their being in your face. It's a virtual writing desk plus bulletin board plus project binder—all in one.

It's $59 after 30 days' trial—not 30 calendar days from when you start, but 30 actual days that you use Scrivener, regardless of when you start. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener

Thanks to Kirsten for this information. If you're serious about writing, Scrivener may be the very program you need to produce your masterpiece.

How to Add a Macro to Word and Its QAT (Quick Access Toolbar)

Microsoft Word's macro features make it possible to turn Word into a lean, mean editing machine. You'll find lots of free editing macros online (see below for some excellent sources). But how can you add a macro to Microsoft Word so it will be available when you need it? Here's the procedure:

Copy the text of the macro, starting with the first “Sub” and ending with the last “Sub.”
Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
Click the “Macros” button.
Type a name for the macro in the “Macro name” box—probably the name used after the first “Sub.”
Click the “Create” button.
Delete the “Sub” and “End Sub” lines that Word created in the macro window. The macro window should now be completely empty (unless you already have other macros in there).
Paste the macro text at the current insertion point.
Click “File,” then “Close and Return to Microsoft Word.”

To actually use the macro:

Place your cursor at the beginning of the document.
Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
Click the “Macros” button.
Click the name of your macro to select it.
Click the “Run” button. (If you wanted to delete the macro, you could press the “Delete” button instead.)

To put the macro on Word’s QAT (Quick Access Toolbar):

Locate the QAT (it’s probably on the top left of your screen either above or below Word’s Ribbon interface).
Right-click the QAT.
Click “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.”
Under “Choose commands from:” click the dropdown list and select “Macros.”
Find and select your macro in the list on the left.
Click the “Add” button to add it to the QAT.
Click the “OK” button to finish.

Writing Down the Chaos

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain. —Bo Dahlbom

High school English class. Freshman year. The teacher explained how to:

Come up with a thesis statement.
Create an outline of arguments supporting the thesis statement.
Write a paper based on that outline.

That's actually a terrible way to write! It requires you to organize your thoughts before you know what those thoughts actually are. But there is a better way.

Brainstorm, Organize, Write

What are your thoughts about a particular subject? In the days before computers, you'd find out like this:

Get a package of index cards, something like these.
On each card, write an idea related to your thesis (the fancy word for whatever it is you want to write about). Do not try to do this in any kind of order; you're brainstorming here: good ideas, bad ideas, any ideas—they all go down on the cards. When your brain is empty, stop.
On a big desk or table, spread the cards out in front of you. Keep them messy.
Read the cards and stack those on a certain subject together until you have several stacks. Discard (pardon the pun) those that don't belong anywhere or that now seem irrelevant or stupid.
Put the cards in each stack in some kind of order. Importance? Chronology? You choose.
Put the stacks in some kind of order. Each stack represents a section of your paper.

After you've captured and organized your thoughts, write your paper, starting with the first card and ending with the last. Each stack gets a subheading. Each card gets a paragraph. When you're finished, edit your paper as needed.

Card-Based Writing Programs

But, again, that was in the days before computers. We now have much better ways of doing what I've just described, with new card-based writing programs popping up all the time. Here are some that I recommend for the kind of writing I've explained in this article:

Milanote. $9.99 a month (billed annually).

Milanote is the most expensive of the programs listed here, but it's also the slickest. Cards can be created and then placed on the screen in any order you like. After you have them all down, organize them into columns. Finally, export the whole thing as a Word document, a Markdown document, or plain text, ready for editing. Milanote is elegant, a pleasure to use.

Speare. $4.95 a month (billed annually).

Speare doesn't support free-form card placement; each paragraph is a card, and all cards must be arranged in a "board." After creating and organizing your cards, "compile" them into a document, copy the document, and paste into Word or another word processor.

SuperNotecard. $19 a year.

SuperNotecard includes various kinds of metadata you can use to organize your cards: headings, flags, ratings, categories, references, and much more. If you're writing a novel, SuperNotecard is probably the way to go, as you can create and link to cards for characters, settings, themes, and so on. At just $19 a year, it's ridiculously cheap.

Notebox Disorganizer is one of my favorites. I've written about it before. It's simple but powerful, and best of all, it's free! (Sorry, PC only.)

I hope you'll give these programs a try, especially if you're feeling stuck in your writing. Brainstorming, organizing, and then writing can make all the difference. Write down the chaos!

Readers Write

After reading last week's article on listing keyboard shortcuts, macro expert Paul Beverley wrote:

I have a version that spreads the list out a bit and covers more aspects. As you'll see from the attached, it's alphabetic in two ways.
http://www.wordmacrotools.com/macros/K/KeystrokeLister

Thanks to Paul for making this resource available.