How To Improve Your Writing And Productivity With Word AutoCorrect
This is a repost from April 2008 ... Randy Ingermanson mentioned how handy this technique can be in his latest Advanced Fiction Writing E-Zine, and I thought I'd share how to do it for free.
So read on ... the following tip will not only IMPROVE YOUR WRITING, but also IMPROVE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY!
As part of the 2008 Genesis contest, one of my judges pointed out that I used the word "was" way too often. Instead I should have chosen better verbs.
So I took my work in progress and I used the find dialog to locate all the offending instances of "was" (using the "highlight all items found in" option), and then highlighted them green. When I scanned my document, I found the judge was right! The little weasels had snuck into my text and had hidden themselves everywhere!
Fixing these existing instances is one thing ... I can do that as I revise the first draft. But how to prevent them in the future—that is the question!
I tried to mentally catch myself as I wrote, and found it very difficult. The little buggers just wanted to pop out of my fingers and jump onto the keyboard!
So here is the solution I found. There is a way in Microsoft Word to auto-highlight offending words as you type them. REALLY!
Click the Read More button below to see the tutorial on how I did it.
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