During the revision and editing phase, it is not uncommon for certain formatting errors to sneak into your manuscript. Where, for example, do these extraneous spaces at the beginning of paragraphs come from?!
You might believe you have to slog through your three hundred or so pages and correct formatting faux-pas by hand. Not so. Quite a few of them can be addressed by familiarizing yourself with “nonprinting” characters. Use this quick check list in conjunction with Word’s Find and Replace function (Ctrl+H) to blast the little buggers into oblivion.
Remember to approve each occurrence separately. If you click “Replace All,” you might be setting yourself up for trouble.
[] indicates a space (i.e. tap spacebar once)
Remove extraneous space at start of a paragraph:
Find: ^p[] (i.e. ^p followed by a space)
Replace with: ^p (i.e. ^p without a space)
Replace extraneous space before punctuation mark:
Find: []? []. [],
Replace with: ? . ,
(em dashes and ellipses may be followed by a space and punctuation mark, depending on house style, so be sure not to click “Replace All.”)
Replace en dashes (–) with em dashes (—):
Find: ^=
Replace with: ^+ or Ctrl+Alt+- (hyphen on the number pad)
(em dashes have no spaces, except at the end of the sentence, where you type —[].)
Replace hyphens (-) with em dashes (—):
Find: –
Replace with: ^+ or Ctrl+Alt+- (hyphen on the number pad)
(Depending on your publisher’s or agent’s house style, em dashes have no spaces, except at the end of the sentence, where you type —[].)
Replace dot dot dot (…) with ellipsis (…):
Find: …
Replace with: Ctrl+Alt+.
(Depending on agent or editor, ellipses have no spaces, except at the end of the sentence, where you type …[].)
Delete stray tabs at the start of a paragraph (when you should have been indenting your paragraphs):
Find: ^t
Replace with: (i.e. leave box empty)
Follow this up by highlighting the entire text, then redoing the hanging indent.
Reformatting extra large spaces between paragraphs:
Highlight all text. Click on the “paragraph” tab and tick “Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style”. Then click “OK.”
Replace double space with single space:
Find: [][]
Replace with: []
You may need to carry out many more pre-submission edits (for example, replacing overused words with more exciting expressions). Once again, intelligent Word formatting comes to the rescue:
Overuse of names (e.g. Anna) in dialogue:
Find: , Anna.
Replace with: (i.e. leave box empty).
Find: , Anna?
Replace with: (i.e. leave box empty)
Overuse of “out of” when “out” will do (e.g. stares out (of) the window):
Find: []out of[]
Replace with: []out[]
(Do NOT accidentally click “Replace All.”)
Overuse of “sit down”/”stand up”/”down on” when “sit”/”stand”/”on” will do (e.g. he sat (down) on the edge of the bed):
Find: sit down
Replace with: sit
If you have any editing tips not covered here, please post a comment. I’d love to hear about new shortcuts and tricks that might speed up the editing process.
