It’s been a while since I wrote my Word Tips for Authors. However, I recently thought of a new one:
When you’ve finished editing a manuscript using Track Changes as described in Tip 6, you need to accept all changes and turn off Track Changes in order to continue with publication. My advice is to read the whole manuscript again at this point.
Why? Because sometimes things aren’t what they seem. I’ve noticed several mistakes in novels that I believe arose because the manuscript wasn’t read at this stage. For example, sometimes there are words that shouldn’t be there, like:
At the back of the bus was a the girl.
Probably, ‘a’ was changed to ‘the’ or vice versa and it wasn’t clear, while Track Changes was on, that the change wasn’t made correctly.
That’s all. I hope you found this tip useful.
Links to Previous Word Tips
- Tip 1: A Matter of Style
About heading styles. - Tip 2: Make Your Novel a Trampoline
How to jump swiftly and gracefully between chapters. - Tip 3: That’s Not What I Wrote
How to stop Word making changes you don’t want. - Tip 4: How Not to Jump to a New Page
Press Enter until a new page appears? Please don’t. - Tip 5: How Not to Indent a Line
The space bar is not for indentation. - Tip 6: Track and Compare
About Track Changes, Compare and Combine. - Tip 7: Replacement Operation
Pitfalls of find and replace. - Tip 8: Automatic Saves
The different ways of saving a document - Tip 9: Accents / Diacritic Marks and Apostrophes
Inserting acutes, graves, umlauts and the rest. Also, getting apostrophes the right way round. - Tip 10: Keyboard Shortcuts
Using keyboard shortcuts to save time.
Miriam Drori, Author 