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!

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.

Listing Keyboard Shortcuts: Two Methods

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

As useful as custom keyboard shortcuts may be in using Microsoft Word, it's sometimes difficult to remember which keys you've assigned to what function. Word itself includes one way to find out:

Click File > Print.
Under "Settings," select "Key Assignments: List of your custom shortcut keys":
Select the printer you want to use.
Click the big "Print" button at the top left.

You'll get a document with entries that look something like this:

As useful as that might be, it's kind of a mess to read. Microsoft could have done a much better job of formatting.

As an alternative, you can list all of your custom keyboard shortcuts with this handy macro:

Sub ListKeyAssignments() 
Dim kbLoop As KeyBinding
Dim aTemp As template
For Each aTemp In Templates
    If LCase(aTemp.Name) = "Normal.dotm" Then 'You can also use the name of a different template here.
        CustomizationContext = aTemp
        For Each kbLoop In KeyBindings
            selection.InsertAfter kbLoop.Command & vbTab & kbLoop.KeyString & vbCr
            selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
        Next kbLoop
    End If
Next aTemp
End Sub

You may already know how to add such macros to Word, but if not, here's how.

And you can learn here how to run it.

Now, create a new document and run the macro. You should get results like this in your new document:

Much easier to read, don't you think?

After you've created a list of your custom keyboard shortcuts, you can change them or create new ones.

I hope this helps you turn your computer into the lean, mean editing machine it was always meant to be.

Review: Geoff Hart’s Effective Onscreen Editing, 3rd Edition

Back in 2007, I reviewed the first edition of Geoff Hart’s book Effective Onscreen Editing, which I still keep close at hand on my bookshelf. Why? Because it’s one of the best books ever written about how to edit on a computer, packed with real-world information you’ll find nowhere else.

My own books (such as Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word) are related specifically to a certain piece of software, but the beauty of Geoff’s book is that it applies to any software an editor might use, on either Macintosh or PC (or a Linux box, for that matter). As Geoff explains, “The overall goal is to teach editing strategies, not specific software.” And in that, the book succeeds admirably.

Geoff covers all of the essentials a working editor needs to consider, including the kind of technical matters that most interest me:

Personalizing your software
Navigating and selecting text
Inserting and deleting text
Tracking revisions
Using comments
Using search tools to improve consistency
Developing style sheets
Using spelling and grammar checkers
Automating editing tasks

He also covers business matters, such as:

Determining your pay rate
Negotiating with clients
Dealing with contracts

But Geoff also addresses the ever-important human side of the editing equation, discussing such matters as:

Encouraging dialogue and communication
Security and confidentiality
E-mail alternatives
Avoiding repetitive-stress injury and other physical problems

In this new edition, Geoff has added important information about recent developments that I’ve seen covered nowhere else:

Collaborative, real-time editing over the Web.
Important new software tools for imposing consistency and applying publisher style requirements.
Proofreading PDF files, online documents, and Web pages.

You’ll find more information about the new edition here. And you’ll find a detailed table of contents here.

If you’re a working editor, you owe it to yourself to buy and read this book, which is available in print, as a nicely formatted and hyperlinked PDF, and as an ebook (free with the PDF) for use with small tablets and smartphones. I make no money from the sale of this book; I'm just an ardent fan. As I said of the first edition, I give it my highest recommendation. And besides, as an excellent writer and a respected teacher known for generously sharing his expertise, Geoff deserves your support. You can purchase the book here.

Many thanks to Geoff for creating this wonderful resource.

Hart, G. 2016. Effective onscreen editing: new tools for an old profession. 3rd ed. Diaskeuasis Publishing, Pointe-Claire, Quebec.
Printed version: 518 p. ISBN 978-1-927972-04-5
PDF version (suitable for most table computers): 827 p. ISBN 978-1-927972-05-2
EPUB version: (unpaginated) ISBN 978-1-927972-06-9

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 years later, when people started switching to InDesign, I created InDesignConverter.

In the past several years, however, both QuarkXPress and InDesign have become much better at importing Word documents directly, without the need for a converter. The crashes are mostly gone, and footnotes come right on in. Nevertheless, I’m wondering what else might be done to a Word document to save time and trouble when importing into a layout program — and I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts about that. Here are some examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:

Add nonbreaking spaces to dates and initials.

For example, if the text includes a date like “August 17, 2016,” most typesetters want “August” and “17” to stay together; adding a nonbreaking space between the two elements does the trick. Similarly, if a name like “C. S. Lewis” shows up, it’s nice to keep the “C.” and the “S.” together. (To add a nonbreaking space in Word [Windows] 2007 and newer, hold down the CTRL and SHIFT keys as you press the spacebar. For Word [Mac], press the Option key as you press the spacebar.)

Remove formatting “overrides.”

Typesetters typically want to handle formatting with styles, so that changing a style attribute in InDesign automatically changes formatting throughout the document. If an author or editor has applied styles in a Word document, those styles can be imported and used in InDesign. But if an author or editor has applied direct formatting using various fonts, that formatting will be imported as “overrides” on the text, which can be a bit of a pain to clean up.

Override Options

In its Styles pane, Microsoft Word offers to “Clear All” formatting and styles from selected text.

Clear All Option

The problem is, “Clear All” really does mean “Clear All,” including not just font overrides but also such local formatting as bold and italic, which needs to remain intact. InDesign’s “Clear Overrides” feature has the same problem. Do you really want to remove italic formatting from the hundreds of journal titles in that giant manuscript you’re editing? If you’re proofreading or setting type, do you really want to put all that formatting back in again by hand? My FileCleaner add-in includes an often-overlooked feature (“standardize font formats”) that removes font overrides but leaves bold, italic, and other local formatting intact, which is exactly what’s needed.

Standardize Font Formats Option

Turn straight quotation marks into curly ones.

InDesign can do this—sort of. But it can’t handle things like “’Twas the night before Christmas” or “A miner, ’49er” (dreadful sorry, Clementine). FileCleaner does a much better job of dealing with this; it properly handles ’til, ’tis, ’tisn’t, ’twas, ’twasn’t, ’twould, ’twouldn’t, and ’em, as well as single quotation marks in front of numbers, all of which then come into InDesign correctly. If you have other items that should be included in this list, I’d love to know what they are.

Remove multiple spaces between sentences.

In the 1800s many books were set with extra space between sentences.

Sample of 1800s Typeset Page

But, frankly, the 1800s were not exactly the golden age of typesetting.

1800s Poster

Modern books include just one space between sentences. Still, many authors continue to use two, following the instructions they were given by their high-school typing teacher back in the twentieth century. And that means the double spaces need to be removed at some point. InDesign has built-in find-and-replace routines that will fix this and a few similar items.

InDesign Find & Replace

FileCleaner, however, fixes many such things. And the version that’s included with Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2014 fixes many more.

FileCleaner Options

Change italic and bold formatting to character styles.

Using character styles in InDesign provides much more stability and flexibility than local bold and italic formatting. It would be nice to have these styles already applied in Word before the document is imported into InDesign. My tools don’t currently do this, but they probably should.

QuarkConverter and InDesignConverter include some other useful fixes.

Quark Converter Options

InDesign Converter Options

Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that there must be things I’ve overlooked. I’m an editor, not a typesetter, so I don’t really know all of the things that typesetters have to fix that they really shouldn’t have to deal with. (This probably includes the most common errors that proofreaders mark.) So if you do typesetting or proofreading, would you help me out? I’d really like to know what I’m missing — things that could be cleaned up in an automated way in Microsoft Word before a document is ever imported into InDesign. What problems do you routinely encounter that you wish would go away? If you’ll let me know, I’ll try to come up with an add-in designed specifically to fix such things. Your suggestions for this would be most welcome.

Of course, typesetters and proofreaders aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this kind of cleanup. It’s also valuable to editors, allowing them to focus on words, structure, and meaning rather than deal with these tiny but pervasive problems. Little things like double spaces and straight quotation marks may not seem all that bothersome, but like pebbles in your shoe, they create subliminal annoyance that really adds up, making editing much more difficult than it should be. At least that’s my experience. What do you think?

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

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, we’ll do this:

Click “View” and then “Draft.”

Click "View" then "Draft"

2. Click “References” and then “Show Notes.”

Click “References” and then “Show Notes”

That should take you into Word’s “Notes Pane,” which should look something like this:

Word’s “Notes Pane"

Deleted Reference Numbers

The superscript numbers in front of each note are called reference numbers. By default, they’re formatted with a character style — either Footnote Reference or Endnote Reference, which you can modify if necessary. What’s interesting about these numbers is that it’s possible to delete them, so the notes look like this:

Deleting Note Numbers

Deleting them, however, is an extraordinarily bad idea. Those numbers may look simple, but under the hood they have a lot going on. The number itself is automatically generated based on the reference number in the text itself. (If you create footnote number 9 in your document, the note itself will start with the number 9. If you delete footnote number 9 in your document, the note and its number will be deleted.) The number also signals the start of a new note, and if it’s gone, document corruption is probably not far behind.

You can often tell if a reference number is missing by looking at the other note numbers. If they’re numbered like this, you know something’s wrong:

A Clue That Something Is Wrong

That’s actually a fairly easy problem to fix: just copy the reference number from one of the other notes and paste it in front of the note that’s missing its number. For example, if you copy the number for note 3 and paste it in front of the numberless note 2, you’ll actually get a 2 in front of the note. Microsoft Word is smart enough to know what the number should be.

Usually, the reason a number is missing is because the author has directly deleted the entire text of the note, like this:

When Note Text Is Deleted Directly

Why Microsoft hasn’t prevented this is beyond me. If the author had deleted the note number up in the main document text, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Typed-In Reference Numbers

Sometimes, in an effort to make notes look “pretty” or meet a certain style, authors will format reference numbers as regular text rather than superscript, then type a period after them. There’s really nothing wrong with that, other than introducing extraneous periods when importing the file into a typesetting program. But some authors actually delete the numbers and type in new ones by hand. You can tell when that has been done by putting your cursor in front of a double-digit note number and pressing the right cursor key. If your cursor moves past the entire number, the number has been automatically generated. But if your cursor moves forward only one digit, the number has been hand-typed.

Again, you could fix the problem by copying an automatic number and pasting it over the hand-typed number, but what if all of the numbers have been hand-typed? Where will you get an automatic number to copy? Simple: just insert a new footnote and copy the number from that. After you’ve finished pasting, delete the extra note (up in the text, remember).

If you have lots of these numbers, you probably won’t want to fix them by hand, so here’s an easier way:

Select all of the notes in the notes pane.
Copy the notes.
Paste the notes at the end of the document.
Using Word’s Find and Replace feature, search for ^f (the code for footnotes) or ^e (the code for endnotes) and replace all of the existing note numbers with a superscript 1. (That will also delete all of the automatic notes in the document.)
Use the “Text to Notes” feature of my trusty NoteStripper add-in to turn the text notes into automatically numbering ones.

“Special” Carriage Returns

Sometimes when editing notes, you’ll try to make a deletion and get the message that “This is not a valid action for footnotes”:

Oops!

What that cryptic message should say is “You can’t delete the carriage return that ends a footnote.” The carriage return that marks the end of a note isn’t a regular return; it’s a special return, and you can’t delete it — Word won’t let you. So what often happens is that authors will delete the note text and its reference number, leaving the carriage return behind. But there is a way to get rid of that return: delete its note number up in the main text of the document. If you can’t tell which note number that is, copy the number of a different note and paste it in front of the note’s carriage return. That will give the note a proper number, and you can then delete the note up in the main text. If you have lots of these extraneous carriage returns, you can get rid of them with a macro, as described in “Lyonizing Word: Deleting Extraneous Carriage Returns in Footnotes and Endnotes.”

Microsoft, Are You Listening?

We wouldn’t have such problems with notes if Microsoft would implement just a few changes:

Make it possible to delete a note by selecting the entire note, including the note reference number, the note text, and the “special” carriage return at the end of the note, and then pressing the Delete or Backspace key (which should also remove the note number from the main text). That would keep authors from leaving behind misnumbered notes and extraneous carriage returns.
Provide additional numbering options for the reference numbers in front of the note text, in particular the option to use full-sized numbers followed by a period. That would keep authors from typing in numbers and periods by hand (maybe).
When trying to delete the reference number or carriage return, provide a message that says “Select the entire note before deleting” or “To remove a note, delete the note number in the main text of your document.”

These changes would do a lot to prevent problems caused by authors who don’t know how to properly use Word’s notes. You can help by letting Microsoft know about these needed changes. Give your feedback at Microsoft’s “Welcome to Word’s Suggestion Box!”

What about you? Have you seen other odd problems with Word’s notes? If so, how have you solved them?

Lyonizing Word: But Which Styles?

by Jack Lyon

In my previous article, Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word, I explained how to make Microsoft Word display only the paragraph styles you want to use. But that raises an important question: 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? Let’s start with the title page; at a minimum, it includes the following elements:

Title
Author
Publisher

It may also include these:

Subtitle
Publication date

And that means you’ll probably need a paragraph style for each one of those. Why? Because the designer may want to format each element differently. Even if that ends up not being the case, you’ve at least allowed for the possibility. In addition, using a different style for each element makes it possible to use those elements as metadata, and that can be important in electronic publishing. Back in the late 1990s, I was involved in the production of an enormous electronic library. Most of the books were already styled with—that’s right—Title, Author, and Publisher, making it fairly easy to access those elements through a database and thus allow the user to sort books by title, author, and so on.

What styles will you need as you get into the book’s chapters? You might want to pull a couple of books off your shelves and see. You’ll probably find that you’ll need (at a minimum):

Chapter number
Chapter title
Body text

And as you get deeper into the book, you may need some of the following:

Block quotation
Poetry
Subheading
Subsubheading

Most books include a multitude of other elements, such as:

Dedication
Epigraph
Caption
Notes
Bibliography

And on and on and on.

Do you really need all of this detail? Yes, you do. Even if epigraphs and captions are going to look the same (e.g., both will use left-justified 10-point New Century Schoolbook), you as an editor, working in an editorial capacity, shouldn’t be thinking about how epigraphs and captions will look; you should be thinking about whether a specific bit of text is an epigraph or a caption and applying the metadata (a style) that marks it as such. Otherwise, the designer and typesetter won’t know for sure which text they need to format in a certain way. In addition, applying the proper metadata (styles) to epigraphs and captions makes them accessible and manipulable in various ways for later electronic publishing.

Can’t you just let the designer or typesetter take care of all this styling? No, you can’t. Deciding what text should be marked with which style is an editorial matter, not a design or typesetting one. Is this bit of text a subheading or a subsubheading? Should that bit of text be run in or pulled out as a block quotation? Is this line really an epigraph or just part of the body text? Is that line a chapter title, or should it be relegated to a subheading? All of these are editorial decisions; they have to do with what the text is and with what the text means.

Design decisions, on the other hand, have to do with how the text looks. The editor has styled this line as an epigraph. Should it be set in Comic Sans? (Horrors!) Should it be set in italics? Should it be a smaller point size than body text? Should it be centered?

So what styles do you really need? It depends on the book. And there’s no way to know without actually going through the book to find out. I tend to do this as I work, creating new styles as the need arises. Hey, that’s a poem! Guess I’ll need a poetry style (which I then create and apply).

And what should my poetry style look like? For editorial purposes, it doesn’t matter, as long as I can tell that the poetry style has been applied. For example, I might set up the style to be indented half an inch on both sides, with the text color set to blue. When the designer and typesetter bring the text into InDesign, they can redefine the style any way they like. But for now, I can tell that I’ve styled that text as poetry, which, for me as an editor, is all that matters.

In this article, I’ve assumed that you’re creating the styles you need to use, as that’s how I usually work. But for the most part, editors who work for publishers don’t need to do that. Publishers often have their own sets of styles that they require editors to use, and these styles are usually stored in a Word template. For example, you can download the Springer template and the Wiley template. Both templates are well worth looking at, just so you can get an idea of what publishers are looking for in the way of styled manuscripts. Wiley provides additional information in an online article "Applying Formatting Styles."

You may also be interested in my Author Tools Template, which is a collection of styles that make it easy for authors (and editors) to produce properly styled manuscripts, which means that publishers can then use those manuscripts without having to restyle the text.

In addition, if you’re working with styles as I’ve explained in this article, you owe it to yourself to check out the Style Inserter in Rich Adin’s EditTools. This is a slick feature that overcomes the problems with styles that I discussed in my previous article (see Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word) and makes it easy to apply publisher styles to a manuscript.

bodytextIt’s worth noting that some publishers don’t use styles at all. Instead, they require editors to mark up text with publisher-supplied codes like the one at the beginning of this paragraph. In that case, it’s important not to type the codes in by hand, as doing so can easily lead to errors. Instead, editors should use something like Code Inserter, which is included in EditTools.

In the 1980s, I worked on the Penta system, which used such codes extensively. During the 1990s, however, I switched to WordPerfect 6.0 and finally to Microsoft Word, and marking text with styles became a more intuitive way to work.

So what styles do I routinely use today? Here’s the minimal list, which I use in all of the books I publish at Waking Lion Press:

Half-Title
Title
Subtitle
Author
Publisher
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Epigraph Source
Part
Chapter
Section
Subsection
Block quote
Poem
Poem Heading
Poem Source
Bibliography
Notes

How about you? What styles do you routinely use? And do you have any tips on how to use them? If so, I’d love to hear from you.

Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word

by Jack Lyon

Microsoft Word includes a powerful feature for marking the various levels of a manuscript (such as headings, block quotations, poetry, and so on). That feature is styles, which are valuable for many reasons, including:

They make it possible to reformat a whole document simply by redefining styles or applying a different template using those styles.
They make it possible to find and replace only text using a certain style. For example, you might want to find source citations by searching for parentheses in text styled as block quotations.
They make it possible to generate a table of contents based on specified styles.

So 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.

My first gripe is that Word decides which styles to show in the Styles area of the Home ribbon, which decision seems to be based on nothing that makes any sense. Right now, it’s showing the following:

Quick Style Gallery

Of the styles available, I use Normal and Heading 1. But Strong? Subtle Emphasis? Intense Emphasis? Who makes this stuff up? Not an actual writer or editor, that’s for sure. So the first thing to do is get rid of the icons for the styles I never use:

Right-click the icon (such as that for Strong).
Click “Remove from Quick Style Gallery” (which, evidently is what the Styles area is called).

Remove from Quick Style Gallery

Now, the question is, when I restart Word or create a new document, does the Strong icon come back? Let’s find out. (Now restarting Word.)

Ha! It’s gone! But what happens if I create a new document? (Now creating a new document.)

Shoot, Strong is back again. So we can conclude that removing a style from the Quick Style Gallery applies only to the document in which we remove the style.

I could get rid of Strong and then save what I’ve done as a Quick Style Set:

Save as Quick Style Set

But I’d like to get rid of Strong once and for all. How can I do that?

Well, I’ll start by showing Word’s task pane (by clicking the little arrow at the bottom right of the Styles area):

Word's task pane

Now I should be able to click the drop-down arrow next to Strong and delete it, right? Nope. Word won’t let me. How annoying!

Delete Strong

Well, then, where does the Strong style live? In Word’s Normal.dotm template, of course. Can I get rid of it there? I open the folder where the template lives, which on my computer is here:

C:UsersJackAppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplates

Then I open the Normal.dotm template. Now can I delete the Strong style?

No, I can’t; same problem as before. Word really, really, really wants to keep its built-in styles — which is why they’re called “built-in,” I guess. So my only recourse is to (1) set how the style will be displayed and then (2) tell Word which styles to display. Here’s how:

Open the Normal.dotm template, which is where your default styles are stored.
Under Style Pane Options (the blue “Options” link at the bottom of the task pane), set “Styles to Show” as “Recommended.” Select “New documents based on this template.”

Show styles as recommended

Under Manage Styles (the third button at the bottom of the task pane), set all styles to “Hide” or “Hide until used” except those you want to show. (Even now, Word won’t let you hide everything.) Select “New documents based on this template.”

Hide Strong

Make any other adjustments you’d like, such as the order in which the styles will appear in the task pane.
Save and close the Normal.dotm template.

After you’ve done that, every time you start Word or create a new document, you’ll get only the styles you want to see. I think. I hope. Maybe.

How about you? Do you have any helpful hints about how to tame Word’s styles? If so, I’d love to hear from you.