Cute Word Tricks

Okay, I admit it. I’m lousy at proofing. I’m the poster boy for Microsoft Word’s spell checker. As for making systematic changes to the text of something I’ve written? Forget about it! I do, however, have a secret weapon. It’s part of Microsoft Word and you can use it too, if you use Word.

Here is the shape of my typical problem and how I use a “Cute Windows Trick” to see patterns in my text: I’ve produced is a rough draft. It’s a first person narrative, and it was produced as quick as I can hit the keys.

My first step is to work spell check to death, along with the grammar checker. Then I read it aloud into a tape recorder and play it back. If I can’t read it aloud, I change it so that I can. So far this is a straight forward exercise.

Now for the interesting stuff. The “Cute Microsoft Word Trick.”

Have you noticed the little icon in the upper right corner of the Microsoft Word tool bar that looks like an Xact-O knife? In reality, it is supposed to look like the business end of one of the yellow highlighters that students use to deface their textbooks while they are studying. This is the key. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go through the text and highlight all the “ly” adverbs? That way we could kill almost all of them. Since this is a first person narrative, it might be a good idea to highlight all the times the “I” appears on a page. If I wanted to put some arbitrary limit on the number of times “I” appeared How about all the forms of the verb “to be”? And just to top it off, we should highlight all these text items in different colors too.

We can do all of this. Here’s how. I’ll start with highlighting all the usages of “I” in this document. First, I click on the “Edit” drop down menu “Replace” submenu. The result is a pop up window labeled “Find and Replace,” which has three tabs labeled Find, Replace, and Go To. The pop up window is on the Replace tab. On that window is a button labeled More with a pair of down-pointing arrow heads. Clicking on the More button expands the pop up window. I put the “I” in the “Find what:” box and and the “Replace with:” box. Then I click the box marked “Match case.” Next I click on the “Format” button at the bottom of the expanded “Find and Replace” pop up window. The button drops down a menu and I check Highlight. When I do this, another button to the right of the “Format” drop down will now show “No Formatting.” Click on this button and it becomes un-highlighted. Next click on the Xact-O knife icon and chose a color. I chose Turquoise. There is a line below the Xact-O knife which now shows the color you have selected. As a last step, click on the “Replace All” button on the pop up window. All occurrences of the word “I” in your text.

This isn’t a perfect method. The letter “I” is highlighted, for instance, where a sentence has a capitalized beginning word that starts with “I”. Also, the “No Formatting” option goes on every time you select another type of text to highlight. Still, it’s just the thing for slaughtering “ly” adverbs and punching up sentences deflated by flaccid “be” verbs. Enjoy.