Editing with AI: Problem or Opportunity?

Last week, I announced the release of MarkMyWords, my new add-in that provides AI-assisted copyediting directly in Microsoft Word. I’ve received numerous emails expressing interest. I’ve also received a few emails expressing reservations, which I thought might be important to address. Here goes:

With MarkMyWords, will Claude AI use my text for training?

Absolutely not. MarkMyWords uses Anthropic’s API (Application Programming Interface), not the consumer claude.ai interface (which does use submissions for training unless you opt out). MarkMyWords sends your text to Anthropic’s secure servers for processing, but Anthropic does not use that text for AI training purposes, and your text is not stored permanently online. You can learn more here:

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/7996868-is-my-data-used-for-model-training
https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/7996866-how-long-do-you-store-my-organization-s-data

Does sending text to AI violate copyright?

Copyright law protects against reproduction and distribution of a work without permission. Have you ever sent a manuscript to a reviewer? to a freelancer? Would you consider that to be a copyright violation? I wouldn’t. Using MarkMyWords to send a document to Claude (a computer program) doesn’t constitute infringement any more than sending a document to DropBox (a computer program). Using Claude with MarkMyWords, no human ever sees the manuscript, and it’s deleted after use.

Is it ethical to use corrections identified by AI rather than a human?

It’s just as ethical as using corrections identified by a spell checker or grammar checker. We’re not using AI to generate a document we plan to pass off as our own; we’re editing an existing document with no interest in authorship. A correction is just a correction. And with MarkMyWords, all corrections are made directly in Word using tracked changes, so you can see exactly what was done, then accept or reject as needed. With MarkMyWords, you, not AI, make the editorial decisions.

What if the AI changes an author’s meaning?

If AI changes an author’s meaning, it’s your job, as editor, to reject the change. But MarkMyWords was made for copyediting, not content editing. The chances of getting changes in meaning are very low.

Won’t editing with AI erode human expertise?

Editing with AI could erode human expertise if the editing was done invisibly, without tracked changes. But MarkMyWords tracks every revision Claude makes, requiring your review before publication is possible. Claude won’t take your place as an editor, but Claude will correct errors and identify problems you might have missed. Reviewing Claude’s changes and explanatory comments can actually enhance human expertise, including your own.

Will MarkMyWords with Claude do my editing for me?

No. Claude should be seen as a supportive tool rather than a substitute for professional editing expertise. Human oversight remains essential for critical or complex editing tasks, which is why MarkMyWords operates as it does.

In conclusion

Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay. At the ACES conference last year, I wondered, Five years from now, will editing still exist as a profession? I believe it will, but for that to happen, we, as editors, need to figure out our relationship with this powerful technology and learn to use it for our profit and advantage. I hope MarkMyWords will help in that effort.

A Conversation with Claude

http://claude.ai

“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!

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.

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.

Wildcard Secrets Revisited

A few weeks ago I sent out an article called "Three Wildcard Secrets." I thought they were pretty good secrets, too! You can see them here.

In a nutshell, here are the first two:

The wildcard range [A-z], meant to find any uppercase or lowercase letter, will not find accented letters. You have to use [A-Za-z] instead. So I suggested using [!A-z] (not A-z) to find any characters that are accented.

Similarly, if you need to find any unspecified Unicode character, you can use the not range [!^000-^255]. That should work, as 255 is the upper limit on ANSI characters, so anything the range finds must be Unicode.

Then I received a corrective email from macro expert Paul Beverley. The nerve! Here's what Paul had to say about secret #1:

You see the problem? It did what you asked, not what you wanted. It finds any character at all, except A-z.

And Paul is right! The range [!A-z] finds not just accented characters but also spaces, punctuation, and other stuff that isn't letters—something I knew if I'd actually thought about it. You can solve the problem by adding more things that you want to skip. Here's an example:

[!A-z 0-9.,;:\-\?\!^001-^064]

(For more information, see my Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word.)

Next, Paul had this to say about secret #2:

On my PC [!^000-^255] throws up an error:

Now technically, I was right about the range being [!^000-^255]. The problem is that Microsoft Word wants [!^001-^255] instead. And to make things even worse, that wildcard range correctly skips the ASCII characters (numbered 0-126) but incorrectly finds the extended ASCII characters (numbered 127-255), even though we've told it not to. Microsoft strikes again!

But wait, there's more!

The range [!^128-^255] gives us the same error message as [!^000-^255].
The range [!^127-^255] finds Unicode characters (which it should) and extended ASCII characters (which it should not).
The range [!^127-^254] skips extended ASCII characters (which it should) and Unicode characters (which it should not).

All of this weirdness seems to hinge on the points where ASCII becomes extended ASCII, and extended ASCII ends.

Might any of this be useful in your editing work? Yes, if you're using wildcard searches:

Use the range [!^127-^255] to find Unicode and extended ASCII characters.
Use the range [!^127-^254] to skip Unicode and extended ASCII characters.

That should work, at least until Microsoft decides to fix these problems.

Many thanks to Paul Beverley for his valuable feedback. If you'd like a bunch of free editing macros with instructions on how to use them, you'll want to download Paul's book Macros for Editors.

Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word

If you're editing or writing in Microsoft Word, you need to understand Word’s advanced search features. These features are extremely powerful, but they’re also virtually undocumented; most explanations of their use have been limited to a simple table of wildcards. My new book, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, explains in detail how you can use these powerful tools to blaze through repetitive problems that would take hours to correct by hand. It covers:

Using Word’s find and replace options (yes, all of them—including the hidden ones).
Finding and replacing with Word’s built-in codes (for dashes, page breaks, and much more).
Finding and replacing with numeric character codes (ASCII, ANSI, and Unicode—when regular letters and numbers aren't enough).
Finding and replacing with wildcards, including wildcard ranges, wildcard groups, and the powerful “Find What Expression” wildcard. (This is the good stuff, the real meat of this book.)

The book explains all aspects of finding and replacing in Microsoft Word, with numerous examples of wildcards used to fix real-world documents, wildcard tips and techniques from readers of Editorium Update newsletter, a reference section for ease of use, and a thorough index.

Although I write and sell Microsoft Word macros for a living, the tools I depend on most are Word's advanced find and replace features. Learning to use these tools takes time and effort, but the payoff is huge. I hope this book will help you use these tools to streamline your work, save time, and make more money!

Daniel Heuman, CEO and founder of Intelligent Editing, sent me the following unsolicited comment:

This. Is. Amazing. What a brilliant, brilliant idea! I've actually been directing people to your wildcard freebie page lately. But this is so much better! The world has needed this book for a while!

Thank you, Daniel! The book is now available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other online retailers.

Resources

Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word is a fairly small (but value-packed) book (114 pages, 5.5 by 8.5 inches). My big book, Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals (632 pages, 7 by 10 inches) is now available as a free download from Intelligent Editing. All you need to do is sign up for Daniel Heuman's free newsletter, which covers a wide range of topics and provides free tips for authors and editors. I subscribe, and I think you should too. When you do, you'll get Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals as a hyperlinked, searchable PDF, perfect for easy reference in handling those tough Microsoft Word problems.

Note: The PDF includes a secret special offer right after the front cover. I won't tell you what it is; you'll need to find out for yourself. But I think you'll like it!

Better word processing: The Chicago Manual of Style interview

The Chicago Manual of Style "Shop Talk" column recently noted:

"When it comes to word processing, CMOS users probably represent every level of expertise (or nonexpertise), but regardless of skill level, we all experience frustration at times when we don’t know how to accomplish a task on our computers. Often we do something the way we’ve always done it—the slow way—because it just seems too difficult or scary to try to automate it. Is there a cure?"

There is a cure, as I explain in my interview with CMOS "Shop Talk." I grew up as a book editor by following the Chicago Manual of Style, so it was a real thrill for me to do the interview. I hope you'll find it interesting and useful.

Best wishes,

Jack Lyon

Spelunking in Microsoft Word

Laura Poole's Editorial Bootcamp

Before getting into today's main article ("Spelunking in Microsoft Word"), I want to mention a great resource: master copyeditor Laura Poole's Editorial Bootcamp, which covers everything from style guides and software to style sheets and spelling. I had the good fortune to sit in on one of Laura's sessions at this year's Communication Central conference. I sat down, buckled myself in, and set my brain to "absorb"! And wow, what a ride! Laura's training is fast, furious, and thorough—serious training for serious editors. Here's what Laura herself has to say:

The Editorial Bootcamp offers live and virtual training for copyeditors, proofreaders, groups, and publishers. With a variety of training topics available, you can find a course for you or have one customized for your organization. We have many years of experience in scholarly publishing and freelancing, and we work hard to impart useful, practical knowledge to attendees. Please see http://www.editorialbootcamp.com for details and information.

If you need editorial training from the ground up, or just need to brush up your skills, I highly recommend Laura's services.

And now, let's go spelunking!

Spelunking is the recreational pastime of exploring caves. It’s a dark and dangerous hobby, an extreme sport for those who are confident in their ability to climb, navigate, and even swim (there’s usually water down there).

I try to avoid such hazards, but I’m not afraid to explore some of the deeper reaches of a computer program—Microsoft Word, for example. That’s one reason I know quite a bit about that particular program. Some of my friends, however, seem terrified of making a “mistake” on the computer. They want a concrete series of steps to follow in everything they do. “How can I make a word bold?” they ask. I reply:

Double-click the word to select it.
Click the “Bold” icon on the Ribbon.

Then they say, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Let me write that down for next time.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with learning to use a computer in that way, and those who are comfortable with that should keep a big Microsoft Word reference book close at hand. These are probably the same people who would enjoy taking a guided tour of Timpanogos Cave, which is about an hour away from where I live.

But that’s a far cry from spelunking, and I doubt that any of the people on the tour discover something new.

So what kind of a person are you? Do you like someone to hold your hand along the well-marked trail? Or would you rather descend into the dark depths of the cavern with only a flashlight as your guide? Either way is fine, but sometimes it’s nice to get off the beaten path; you never know what you might find. As Henry David Thoreau once said, “Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.”

Want to learn something new about Word? Try exploring Word’s features that aren’t on any menu, the caverns that aren’t on the map. Here’s how:

Press ALT+F8 to open the Macros dialog.
Click the dropdown list next to “Macros in.”
Select “Word Commands.”

Now, in the window under “Macro name,” you’ll see all of the commands available in Microsoft Word, whether they’re on the Ribbon or not. If you click one, you’ll see a description of its function under “Description,” at the bottom of the dialog. These descriptions are minimal at best, but along with the name of the command, they’ll give you some idea of what the command does. You can also click the “Run” button to run the command, which may give you even more insight. (Be sure to do this only with a junk document; you don’t want mess up an actual project.)

Let’s take a look. Don’t be afraid; I’ll be right behind you all the way.

So we’re scrolling through the list of Word commands in Word 2013, and what do we see? “CharacterRemoveStyle,” which, according to its description, “Clears character style from selection.” What?!? Does this mean it’s possible to remove a character style without affecting text-level formatting (such as italic)? If so, I sure didn’t know about it. Let’s find out. We type a junk sentence into a junk document:

This is a test to see what will happen.

We apply italic formatting to “test” and the character style “Emphasis” character style to “see”:

This is a test to see what will happen.

The formatting of those two words looks the same, but the formatting is not the same. Now let’s see if the “CharacterRemoveStyle” command works. We select the sentence, press ALT+F8, scroll down to “CharacterRemoveStyle,” and run it. Look at that! Our test sentence becomes:

This is a test to see what will happen.

The character style is gone, but the text-level formatting is still there. Neat!

Okay, one more, and then we’ll go back up to the surface. Down, down, down, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. What’s this? “RestoreCharacterStyle.” I’ve never noticed that command before. The description says “Restores character style and removes direct formatting.” Could this be the inverse of the command we just finished exploring? Again we type our junk sentence and apply the same formatting as before:

This is a test to see what will happen.

Then we select the sentence and run the “RestoreCharacterStyle” command. Yes! The sentence now looks like this:

This is a test to see what will happen.

The text-level formatting is gone, but the character style remains!

But why does Microsoft say that this command restores a character style? If we remove the character style from our sentence and then run the command, does the character style come back? A quick experiment shows us that no, it doesn’t. Then why the odd name? I suspect that under the hood, Word is removing all character-level formatting but then restoring any formatting applied with a character style. It’s the equivalent of (1) identifying the character style, (2) pressing CTRL+SPACEBAR (to remove character-level formatting), and then (3) reapplying the character style — which means that the command was named from the programmer’s perspective rather than the user’s perspective. There’s a lot of stuff like that down here in the dark, and it’s part of what makes exploring so interesting.

Back up in the daylight, we assess our adventure, which I’d have to say has been a success. We’ve discovered two commands we didn’t know about before. Could they be useful in our actual editing work? Yes, indeed!

Personally, I enjoy crawling around down there in the bowels of Microsoft Word. Yes, it’s dark and it’s dirty, and sometimes I find something nasty under a rock. But I also make lots of interesting discoveries, and I nearly always learn something new.

How about you? Ready to go spelunking on your own? Have fun, and don’t forget your flashlight!

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 and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.