Editorium Update

If you’ve read many past issues of this newsletter, you know that I loathe Word’s AutoFormat options, although I do use one of them–”Replace straight quotes with smart quotes.” But sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I can’t insert a quotation mark going the right direction. If I want a closing quotation mark, Word insists on giving me an opening one–or vice versa. If you’ve run into this problem, you know how maddening it can be. Wouldn’t it be nice to type precisely the kind of “smart” quotation marks you need without having Word second-guess what you’re doing? It turns out there’s a built-in way to do that. Here are the key commands you need:

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Recently a colleague said to me, “Look at this manuscript. All the ordinal numbers are superscripted.” What he meant was that “1st,” “2nd,” “3rd,” and so on had the “st,” “nd,” and “rd” in superscript. Then came an interesting question: “Do you think I should leave them that way?”

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Microsoft Word uses what’s known among professional indexers as “embedded indexing.” That means the index entries are placed as codes in the text of the document being indexed. Then, later, the codes are used to generate the index automatically. (You can learn more about using Word’s indexing features by searching for “Index” in Word’s Help file.)

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