Читать книгу Working Words - Elizabeth Manning Murphy - Страница 13

14

Here is the answer to how to use Microsoft Word’s Track Changes, Find and Replace, Styles and other editing tools. It was delightful to find Michele Sabto’s very handy little book called The on-screen editing handbook (see ‘References’). The book is not new – it was published by Tertiary Press in Victoria in 2003 – but the information is so clearly set out that I would recommend it to anyone taking up on-screen editing for the first time, or wanting to brush up on some of the topics in the book. It’s very compact: 89 A5 pages, crammed with screen images or ‘dumps’ to illustrate points, and full of step-by-step instructions for doing just about everything. Although it’s based on a much older version of Word (Word 2000), many aspects of Word’s functionality are much the same. I have since moved on to Word 2007 with no difficulty, and would not expect any problem transferring to a later incarnation of Word.

For newcomers to on-screen editing, the first thing you need to know is that the built-in spelling and grammar check facilities are next to useless. The spelling check, for instance, will happily allow there, their and they’re in situations where only one of those is correct. Why? Spellcheck can only spell – it can’t tell the difference between those words contextually. It will recommend who’s as a replacement for whose when whose was correct in the first place. Spellcheck will pick up a ‘spelling error’ in the expression mind your p’s and q’s and suggest changing p’s to any one of a number of options like: pHs, ape’s, pass, pes, puss. It doesn’t like q’s either but can only come up with one suggestion: EQ’s.

The grammar check will pull me up at the sentence in the paragraph above: The book is not new – it was published by Tertiary Press in Victoria in 2003 – but the information … It doesn’t like the passive and wants to change it to Tertiary Press in Victoria published it in 2003. Fair enough, but any competent editor knows that it’s just as silly to cram a document with active voice as with passive voice – variety is the spice of effective writing. These devices have their uses merely as checks for typos or to help in your thinking about a grammatical construction that may be unwieldy. They should not be used as the sole editing tools, and a client should understand that using these tools will not obviate the need for an editor.

The book is divided into six chapters, starting with Chapter 1 ‘Managing files’. This is an aspect of on-screen editing that a lot of people don’t think 15 about until they find they have a mess of files scattered throughout their emails and other Word documents, in ‘My documents’, ‘My briefcase’, and perhaps even in a file labelled with the client’s name. But logically, file management should come first, as it does in this book. A simple procedure is suggested, based on the blindingly obvious: new job – new folder. Then the reader is warned about the dangers of not filing absolutely everything – files can easily get lost. It was gratifying to discover that my filing methods are pretty close to the recommendation – first make a copy of whatever the client sends you and keep one version untouched as a reference and use the other as the first working version. Keep that pattern of behaviour up, and you should arrive at the end of the job with a complete progressive picture of how the job proceeded, right up to and including a final version ready for the printer.

I remember once being asked by a regular client whether I’d kept a complete file of all stages of the edit, as they had lost their files in some sort of catastrophe. Yes, they were all stored safely, and the missing documents could be sent to the client to restore their own files to what they should have been. That was a lesson to all – it was impressed upon me to be meticulous about keeping files complete and always up to date. At the end of every job, my practice is to transfer everything in that folder – all stages of the edit, correspondence, copies of invoices and other files – to a CD. Usually, it is then possible to shred paper records and delete the files from the computer, but even those are kept for a while – just in case of another catastrophe. (It would be nice to be able to say the same for my hard-copy personal filing system, which currently needs a bulldozer through it!)

Chapter 2 of the book deals with ‘Removing redundant spacing’ – like what? Well, to start with, extra spaces after punctuation: many authors were taught (as I was) to type two spaces after end punctuation and one elsewhere, but the norm today is one space after all punctuation, both to keep it simple and to avoid problems when full justification is used (huge spaces can appear after full stops as text is dragged across to the right-hand margin). This is where the Find and Replace feature comes in handy: if you haven’t found it yet, it’s in the Edit menu, Home tab or Navigation pane. Select Replace and position the cursor in the Find What textbox – if we’re changing double spacing after just full stops, for example, type a full stop followed by two spaces. Now place the cursor in the Replace With textbox and type a full stop followed by one space. Now click the Replace All button, and watch the magic happen before your eyes. A message will tell you how many times the alteration was made in the document. You can use this feature for all manner of global alterations, such as changing all double quotes to single quotes, one 16 kind of dash to another, all spellings of an unfamiliar name from the wrong spelling to the correct spelling, and so on.

The matter of ‘styles’ in on-screen editing preparatory to publication was always a bit of a mystery to me in my early days of editing. Sometimes sorting out styles is forced on you when you receive an editing job that has already been gone over by someone else who has set certain styles that seem inappropriate, or that are haphazard. Some publishers have templates of styles that you must adhere to, but more often than not, you need to set your own. Chapter 3 ‘Creating and applying styles’ sets out clearly how to go about it. For those who are new to this, there is a hierarchy of styles – put very simply, you might want all main side headings to appear in Arial bold 14pt, all subheadings in Times New Roman italic 12pt, and body text in Times New Roman regular 12pt, like this:

Main side heading

Subheading

Body text which burbles on and on about something …

You can set all this in Styles, which is in the Format menu, the Home tab or the Styles pane. Michele Sabto goes into a lot of helpful detail about formatting styles of all kinds, including bullet-point lists and tables – it’s well worth careful study.

When you edit in hard copy, your alterations are there for all to see – textual marks, marginal marks and notations, and probably extra pages of explanations. You can do all that, and more, using Track Changes in Word, or the equivalent in other programs. Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Editing with track changes and comments’. The Track Changes feature in Word displays the changes you make as you make them. If you delete something, it changes colour, or is moved to a side balloon, and may be marked with a strikethrough. If you add something, it is added in a different colour. You can highlight text that you want to make a long comment about; and you can write comment notes right at any point in the text.

The material on this topic in the book is very well set out in easy steps, and covers much more than is outlined here, including ‘accepting’ and ‘rejecting’ changes, altering or deleting comment notes, printing with and without revision marks or comments showing and so on. A word of warning: it is perilously easy to forget to save the version with all your revision marks – use Save As to save versions and give them suitable names and pop them into that job folder.

17 The remaining chapters of the book, Chapter 5 ‘Working with authors’ and Chapter 6 ‘Other Word features’, are very short but valuable. We sometimes forget that editing isn’t just a matter of putting little marks on documents – there’s a client out there who is perhaps also the author; we need to develop a pattern of dealing in a businesslike and helpful way with these people from quote to invoice. Depending on the type of work you are editing, you may need to know about inserting footnotes and endnotes, preparing a table of contents, creating templates to standardise the look of a large document over all its parts, and creating macros to save you the effort of repeating the same chores (such as Find and Replace actions) – all set out in the final chapter.

This little book is a good guide for anyone new to on-screen editing. It won’t replace training courses and it won’t replace on-the-job experience but it will enhance both. Word has now moved on to 2016 and beyond. An upgrade is not on my agenda at the moment, but a bit of advice is appropriate here: this book is still excellent for its general principles – just be aware that some of the facilities get moved to different places with each incarnation of Word.