Many of you are probably familiar with the function within Microsoft Word that allows us to find a particular word or phrase and replace it with something else. Like the ubiquitous spell-check, sometimes this works wonders and other times it can cause more trouble than it’s worth.
Let’s say I have a 150 page document and I want to change the name Mark to Marvin. I click on the “Home” tab in Office 2010 at the very far left corner of my manuscript. Then on the far right I see the words “Find,” “Replace” and “Select.” I hit “Find” and type in Mark. Then I click “Replace” and type in Marvin and hit OK. Bravo. Everything converts.
But recently I went into a 3300 word document and tried to replace the word “she” with “I.” Word made 1119 replacements! Not exactly the correction I had in mind. Even though I had capitalized the term “I,” it replaced the character “i” in every word including “with,” “interesting” or “line.” Fortunately, I was able to exit from my writing without saving it and decided to replace the word “I” manually. If anyone has any better suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Sigrid Macdonald is the author of three books, including Be Your Own Editor, available on Amazon in paperback for $15.34 (http://tinyurl.com/39kx9zq) or Kindle (http://tiny.cc/mzk4c) for $3.79. Visit her at http://sigridmacdonald.blogspot.com.
Sigrid, there should be a pulldown menu that enables you to “match case” and several other functions. In my version of Word (2008 for Mac), you have to click on a little blue arrow in the “Find/Replace” popup window, which gives expanded choices like matching case or “find whole words only.”
It may be in a different location in a different version of Word, but you should be able to find it. Hope that helps!
Jake, that’s brilliant! Thanks so much for the tip.
I’m cowriting a fourth book with my sister and we started out writing it as fiction. Now we’re turning it into nonfiction, so I need to change the protagonist from “she” to “I.” I may still have been working on it five years from now without that great advice.
Much appreciated 🙂
Sigrid