Editorium Update

While using Microsoft Word, I’ve often thought how great it would be if I could type two hyphens and get an em dash. Also, when I type a hyphen after a number, I want the hyphen to turn into an en dash to indicate inclusive numbers, like these: 3-10. Microsoft Word 97, 98, and 2000 try to address the em-dash issue with the AutoCorrect (as you type) feature, but they muff it by requiring three hyphens for an em dash and two hyphens for an en dash. How intuitive is that?

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One of the main problems editors have working on a computer is that they lose their sense of proportion about the manuscript. What do I mean by sense of proportion? While working on a paper manuscript, with the pages piled neatly on the desktop, editors know exactly how much work they’ve done: 112 pages, stacked on the left, are finished; 204 pages, stacked on the right, are left to edit. In my experience, they also know that chapter 3 is about, oh, half an inch from the bottom in the left-hand stack if they need to go back to it. And they know, semi-consciously, that the odd foreign word the author used was about twenty pages back and about a third of the way down the page. In other words, they have a “positional memory” that helps them find things. It’s not as efficient as their word processor’s “find” function, but it’s not bad, either.

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Maybe you’ve seen that funny little poem about spell checkers that occasionally makes its way around the Internet. It comes in various versions, but the first and last stanzas usually go something like this:

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If you’ve done much editing in Microsoft Word, you’ve probably noticed that some of Word’s “helpful” features just get in your way. Luckily, Microsoft has made it possible to turn those features off, so that what you type is what you get. Here are some of the more common problems with some possible solutions.

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