Writing Aids to Use with Care

In your Word program, when checking your writing for typos and oversights, it is often helpful to use the Find feature. You might have noticed a mistake and then wondered if you made that same mistake in other parts of the manuscript. By clicking on Find and typing in the word you are looking for, you will soon see if there are other cases of that same error.

Find is a great tool, but like any tool in writing, you must not rely on it for your sole method of finding mistakes.

Here is an example of what could happen.

Let’s say you decided to change one of your characters from a woman to a man. You want to change all the cases of Mary to John. You click on Find and type in Mary. Find will show you all the cases where Mary appears and by clicking on Replace  under the Find Options, you can then type in John, and it will replace Mary with John. You can do this one name at a time, or you can choose to Replace All and it will be done in a millisecond. Let’s just hope that you haven’t mentioned anyone cooking with rosemary and they now are cooking with rosejohn.

Slick, eh? (except for that funny herb seasoning).

SO, be careful with this tool. Let’s say you’ve successfully changed all the cases of Mary to John, and now you want to change all the cases of her to his.  Same procedure. Click Find and type in her. If you use Replace All to change her to him, it will be done instantly, but you could end up with words like mother to be changed to mothis, father to become fathis, there to become thise and here to become hise. 

While it is a great tool, use Find and Replace carefully.

While I’m on the subject of tools within Word or any other word processing program, be on the lookout for the spellchecker not being as smart as you are.

If you have your options set on Autocorrect as you Type, be aware that the computer doesn’t always know what you want to say and it may assume it knows better. One example I run into a lot is when I type my friend’s name. As I write, “Dear Maggie,” the computer changes it to “Dear Magpie.”  So be careful of that (usually) convenient autocorrect feature.

Dear Magpie – Oops ! I mean Dear Maggie.

Also, be aware that there are some words that you may type in error but they still make a word, so the spellchecker doesn’t pick them up. Here are a few words that you may type in error and the spellchecker will leave them as they are:

except when you mean expect

lost for lots

then for than

exist for exits

laugher for laughter

I’m sure there are many more, but you get the picture. Use the spellchecker and the Find feature as tools, but know that, at the end, you always have to read the work carefully yourself.