Please welcome Terry Odell, our regular 3rd. Tuesday guest blogger. She has some good tips about using the Find/Replace function in Word. Thanks Terry. The theme this month here at the Blood Red Pencil is technology. Anyone trying to become a writer these days has to accept that learning to use a computer is part of the deal. Whether or not you prefer to write your manuscript longhand on legal tablets, eventually, you're going to have to get all those words entered into some word processing program. I'm hardly a technology wizard. I can remember our first computer (An Apple II) and breaking out into a sweat any time I had to do anything other than type words. I knew I'd hit a wrong key and either lose everything or blow up the computer. But as the industry standards change, we have to be willing to change with them. And once you're committed to using a word processor, you find that it does all sorts of nifty tricks . In fact, I have trouble writing with a p...

Many former typists find it difficult to break certain habits, such as pressing Enter at the end of each line (hard return) instead of allowing Word to automatically wrap the lines of the document, and typing a double space after a period or semi-colon. Word’s Find and Replace feature can be used to fix this habit retrospectively so that you can get on with writing (typing) the way you are used to. Find and Replace can be accessed with the shortcut Ctrl-f . Double Space After Punctuation Replacing a double space after punctuation is easy: simply type two spaces into the Find What box and one space into the Replace With box, and click Replace All. Hard Return To get rid of a hard return or Paragraph Mark, click “More” in the bottom left of the Find and Replace dialog box. The dialog box will expand to include further options. Click Special▼ and select “Paragraph Mark”. The code “^p” should appear in the Find What box. In the Replace With box, type a space. This will fill in ...

The time has come for you to print off a copy of your manuscript to send out to an editor, but something's gone screwy with Word. Surprise, surprise. Your quick glance through the document found a word that should have been in italics, but wasn't. So you corrected that, only to have your entire document converted into italicised text. Then there's those pesky curly quotes that won't go away. You know your editor wants them straight up, no twist. Here's how to troubleshoot some of the trickier formatting woes. Automatically Updating Styles MS Word's formatting tools have a feature for automatically updating the formatting as you work. This can be very handy if you're using it for a specific style that has a single function (like making notes), but it can also be a right pain if you forget that it is turned on and you start fiddling with the formatting. This is the feature you need to turn off if you find your whole document changing formatting when yo...

In my last post ( Employing eTools) , I talked about when not to trust electronic tools. In this post, I'd like to talk about some ways to use the tools effectively. Since I picked on word processors last time, I'll start with them. Find and Replace Most modern word processors have a 'find' function which is used to find a specific series of characters and a 'replace' function that is used to replace one string of characters with another. I use these features to find all the places I typed the word "form" when I meant to type "from". I make this mistake (form for from) all the time. I know I do it, and I still don't see it when it happens. So I use find and replace. I do not use "replace all". Why not? Because "form" is a perfectly good word and sometimes I use it on purpose. Using 'replace all' would simply replace one error with another. Instead, I use "find next" to find each instance of "for...