How to Edit like a Pro Part 2: Automated Editing

In our last post, we talked about automated editing using find and replace. Today, let's look at another form of automated editing using the grammar and style checkers in MS-Word. If you use a program like Scrivener to compose your novel, you will need to export it as a .doc or .docx file and open it in MS-Word to use this approach.

First, let me get a basic misunderstanding out of the way about grammar checkers. They are not perfect. They are even less functional than spell checkers. Just as things can slip through a spell checker, a lot can slip through a grammar checker. Also a grammar checker is likely to flag for review things that are perfectly fine.

Having made that disclaimer, I must say, they can save you a bunch of time, and they often find things I might have missed or overlooked.

First, you need to find and configure your grammar checker. To begin you need to click file->options->proofing. You will get a screen that looks like this:

First, you can check anything you like in the spell checking options. These are my settings, but you might try different ones. For instance, you might not want to check grammar and spelling together. You could uncheck that. I leave in frequently confused words like "it's" and "its" and "your" and "you're" because I do tend to mix those up even though I know when to use which. However, you might not confuse words that easily, so you might want to speed things up by unchecking it. 

Now click on the box marked "settings" next to the Grammar and Style option. You will now get a screen that looks like this:

and

This is how I set up mine based on what my issues are. You may have different issues. For instance, maybe you tend to use a lot of cliches. So you might want to leave that one checked. Or you have trouble with passive sentences. (Actually, I should have that one checked, but I set this up for someone else to do a preliminary screening before I do my more complete editing.) 

Once you have the settings where you want them, click okay, then exit the set up.

You are now ready to run your grammar check. This can take awhile. The system is set up to flag anything suspicious which means you get a good number of false hits. However, don't dismiss it quickly. Read the whole sentence and make sure it is off base. Sometimes, you can dismiss something too quickly.

If there is a stylistic suggestion like to correct passive voice, you might want to just highlight that sentence and come back to it later.

When you are doing a spell check and a special word, like an unusual name or, if you write science fiction and fantasy, words for high tech gadgets you made up or wizardy effects, keeps popping up as misspelled, add it to your dictionary. That will keep you from slowing down too much. Also, if you find a certain rule is most often not applicable when it pops up, you might want to go back and uncheck that one. It will take awhile to configure the grammar check to your writing style, but once you do, it will catch maybe up to 60-70 percent of the grammar, spelling and punctuation problems. That's not creating a clean manuscript by any stretch of the imagination, but it's cutting down your workload by more than half.