Using Word Editing tools in the wild – part i

19/3/2021

Using Word Editing tools in the wild – part i

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In previous posts, I have tried to help you overcome your fear of macros, touched on wildcard searches and mentioned PerfectIt every now and then in passing. In this post and the next, I am going to give you an overview of how I use these tools at the beginning of an editing project.

Before I start the main part of the edit – actually reading the text– I want documents to "look" as if they have already been edited. By this I mean, that all the double spaces, extra lines and random tabs have been removed; heading levels have been applied; and most of the known style issues dealt with (obviously, many style issues have yet to become apparent). This process means that, if the text has been well-written, when I start reading I can concentrate on the words and don’t keep tripping up over niggling problems with sentence furniture. It goes without saying that this is just an example of an editing routine: other people will have their own routines that are tailored for the type of editing that they do.

I first started editing this way when I was asked to edit chapters from the latest edition of a large medical textbook. The chapters were anything from 2K to 100K, and included numerous tables and figures; there were approx. 40 chapters in total, although I didn’t have to edit all of them; the style guide was minimal; the deadline was unknown; the references were a mess … and I needed a plan!

The editing I do before I start editing

This is the start of my editing checklist for this project:

I have the icons I need to run the first few items from the list on the left-hand side of my Quick-Access Toolbar:

Clean up: for this I use FRedit. This rather clever macro* runs through a list of Find and Replace routines that you list on a FRedit script. I use it to remove double spaces, double paragraph returns, tabs, manual line breaks, fixed spaces, straight single quotes, spaces after paragraphs. FRedit allows you to apply styles to the replaced text, so my FRedit script applied Heading 1 style to ‘Introduction’ and ‘References’ so that I would start off with some structure to my document.
Spell check: For this I run LanguageSetUK – a macro sets the proofing language to UK English in the main document and the comments – then SpellingErrorLister as most of the documents I work on are a mass of red squiggles according to Word's usual spell check.
SpellingErrorLister lists all the words that Word thinks are spelling “errors” at the end of the document. I scan the list to pick out words that I know are incorrect and find and correct them in the document, and I google the ones that I’m not sure about (using GoogleFetchQuotes) and correct in the document if necessary.
Attach template: Using the same template for all the chapters in this book made it easy to spot errors in heading levels, and the uniform appearance of the text reduces distractions. I recorded a little macro to quickly attach a template to my chapters. Once the template is applied, I zoom out to two pages using ‘Multiple Pages’ on the ‘View’ menu and apply heading levels, using the key combinations CTRL-ALT-1 for Heading 1 and CTRL-ALT-2/3 for Heading 2/3.
Remove all caps from headings: The headings for this textbook needed to be in title case, but were frequently in ALL CAPS. This is easy to deal with once heading styles have been applied. I will talk about using Word styles to make editing easier in another post. Word styles allows you to select all instances of a particular style (in this case Heading 1). Once you have selected all Heading 1 text, go to the ‘Change Case’ in the ‘Font’ section of the Home tab, and select lower case. Use the TitleHeadingCapper macro to amend to title case.

By this stage, I will have gone from something that looked like this:

To something that looks like this:

This document is much tidier than the original, and has some kind of structure – the document headings appear in the Navigation pane, which gives a good overview of the text.

The next jobs on my checklist are using PerfectIt and Docalyse. I will talk about these stages in Using Word editing tools in the wild – part ii.

*Unless otherwise stated, macros referred to are written by Paul Beverley and are available from his website. Paul very kindly provides instructions for all his macros.

Author

Andrea at Yours Truleigh Editing.
www.yourstruleighediting.com