Adrienne is an editing instructor and certified copyeditor with 27+ years experience editing technical materials that inform and educate. They created the Right Angels and Polo Bears podcast in 2013, have been teaching editing in university publishing programs since 2012, and has published books on science, editing, and freelancing.
Though the “naked URL” in a file might look simple and direct, the link coded to that might contain details you don’t want readers to see. Like, for example, that readers could see that the source of the link was ChatGPT. (The concern with that is explained at the end.)
Because of the time required to alter graphs and charts, these are best checked earlier on than the copyediting stage. Since that rarely happens, proofreaders, especially, should put graphs and all illustrations through a thorough quality check.
Word is turning on AI by default and claims the right to use your “data” to train it. If you have an NDA or other contractual or ethical need to protect the content in the files you are working on, turn off Connected Experiences. If you don’t see this option right now, check back frequently until you do; features are rolled out to users over time.
Word counts matter for estimating the finished length of a book, whether an article will fit in the layout, and how much time (and money) we’ll need for editing and design and other production steps. But not all words are counted equally, and even more so, perhaps lengthy words like sesquipedalian or phosphofructokinase should be counted as more than equivalent to cat or it. Such words can make technical texts considerably longer than an equivalent number of words in a novel.
Typing cmd + F now opens this Find in Document pop-up in MS Word for Mac. The pop-up works much the same way as this simple find always did. And clicking the kabob menu to the right of the Search field opens the drop-down menu shown, where you can launch the Replace window or the Search pane (sidebar) to see a list of matches for the searched characters.
QJust a few chapters in this book I’m editing have used a 1)a)i) structure for nested lists. Is there an easier way to make them match the other •o– lists without restyling them line by line?!
AYes! It involves the multilevel list button on the Home ribbon and (at best) Styles for each level in the list.
The Tables group (item?) on the Insert ribbon is where to both insert a table and where to turn tabbed content into a table without the need to retype or drag and drop.
Word files get bloated because they’re long, have big/many photos, and because they store a whole lot of data about changes that have been made. These are several ways to reduce the bloat. Use them independently or in any combination for maximum results!
