Author Archives: Jack Lyon

An important part of editing is marking type specification levels in a manuscript. The Chicago Manual of Style describes the process like this: “Each item in the opening of an article or of a preface, chapter . . . , appendix, or other section of a book (title, chapter number, etc.) is marked for its […]

I finally went out and bought that new monitor I mentioned last week–a 19-inch Sony that looked great in the store (playing the Jurassic Park DVD!). But when I got it home and hooked it up, it didn’t look so good. The characters in Microsoft Word looked jagged, and the toolbar icons were huge! Couldn’t […]

This week I’ve been shopping around for a new monitor. That got me thinking about what editors need in the way of computer equipment. If you work for a corporation, the powers-that-be probably think like this: “Editors just do word-processing, so they don’t need much of a computer.” Then they buy you something cheap and […]

Microsoft Word provides several keyboard shortcuts to help you move around a document, which is important when you’re serious about editing efficiently. You may not know, however, that Word includes commands to move from sentence to sentence–highly useful for an editor! The commands aren’t mentioned in Word’s Help file, and they’re not assigned to any […]

As you’ve edited various manuscripts, you’ve probably noticed the propensity of some authors to type headings in all caps, as I’ve done with the title of this article. This holdover from the days of typewriting is, to put it bluntly, bad practice. Why? Because in typesetting or desktop publishing, putting a heading in all caps […]

After reading our last newsletter, subscriber Debby English wrote: “In your latest issue, ‘Creating New Documents,’ you mentioned that you have modified Word’s built-in invoice template. I would like to do the same but cannot find it in my Word template directory. Can you give me a clue about where it might be and what […]

In our past few newsletters, we’ve been talking about templates–attaching them, creating them, and so on. There’s still one area we haven’t talked about: creating *new* documents based on existing templates. If you’re an editor, you may be thinking, “I usually work on documents someone else has created.” True enough. However, as an editor you […]

It’s midnight at the publishing house. All the cubicles are dark–except one in the back corner, where a frazzled production editor struggles to finish formatting a 700-page book that’s due at press in eight short hours. Can’t we do something to help? As we’ve seen in our newsletters the past few weeks, Microsoft Word documents […]

Microsoft Word comes with several templates for creating reports, press releases, resumes, and other documents. These templates can come in handy, but, as subscriber David Ibbetson writes, “The best way to use templates is to make your own according to your tastes and needs. Built-in templates can be valuable as a source of ideas, and […]

Last week we used Microsoft Word’s Style Gallery to understand one of the main reasons for using templates: to change the formatting of all of the styles in a document. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1704442036 Why would you want to change the formatting of all of the styles in a document? Let […]