Category Archives: Editing

I frequently edit books that are compilations of articles by various authors. Some know how to use Word pretty well; others don’t have a clue. Those in the latter category either don’t use paragraph styles or create styles that aren’t needed. After I’ve fixed and consistently applied the styles I need, I like to get […]

One of the oddest things in Microsoft Word is its seeming inability to copy and paste text that includes tracked revisions. If you want to see what I’m talking about, try this: 1. Create a new document. 2. Type a few lines of text. 3. Turn on revision tracking. (Double-click the TRK box in the […]

Back in my WordPerfect days, I used to enjoy the program’s ability to do all kinds of fancy sorting. Microsoft Word has never been able to duplicate that, but it can still do more than you might think. Let’s say you’ve got a list of names, like this: Kit Carson Annie Oakley Buffalo Bill You […]

Last week’s newsletter explained some ways a concordance could be used in editing, with a promise that this week I’d show you a sneaky way to take that concept even further. So here goes. There you are with a manuscript that needs editing, and lots of it. A cursory look reveals multiple inconsistencies and odd […]

Our previous newsletter mentioned our WordCounter program, which can now tell you how many times each word has been used in a document–and I promised to show you how that might be useful for editing. The newsletter also featured a macro that will create a concordance, or list of all words used, from a Word […]

Have you ever needed to make a list of every word in a document? If so, here’s a macro that will do it for you automatically. Basically, the macro marks an index entry for every word in your document, generates the index, and removes the page numbers, leaving you with an alphabetical list of words […]

Our previous article outlined a fairly lengthy Find and Replace routine to make sure inclusive (elided) numbers follow the style outlined in the Chicago Manual. Astute reader Andrew Lockton responded with a technique that is so important, it deserves a second article. Andrew suggested taking the “Find What Expression” wildcard, which takes the form 1, […]

I recently worked on a manuscript with lots of source citations, many of which had page numbers formatted like this: 122-123 I prefer the shorter style recommended in the Chicago Manual of Style (8.69): 122-23 And besides, the manuscript was inconsistent, sometimes using one style, sometimes the other. Not wanting to fix all of these […]

All this talk about editorial style sheets in the past couple of newsletters got me thinking again about lists of automatic corrections. Long ago, I wrote about this and provided a couple of such lists: http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708048908 http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708127357 http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708293844 I now realize, however, that those lists don’t include nearly as many typographical errors as they could. […]

I get manuscripts with all kinds of weird formatting, but recently I got one from which all formatting had been removed. That might have been all right, but the note reference numbers were no longer superscript; they all looked something like this.42 I wasn’t about to fix all those by hand, so I came up […]