Working Words. Elizabeth Manning Murphy

this up takes very little time, and paid work can continue while the printing proceeds. So the voluntary organisation benefits as they only get charged for paper and ink cartridges.

      The friendly computer can help us to be organised too. For those new to computers (believe it or not, I know of some, even within editorial ranks), there are facilities for putting material in specific folders, so that all the work for one client can be gathered together in one place, for instance. This gets rid of clutter, particularly in your email Inbox. And what do you do with this 13 clutter? If it’s important, it should be saved, and all business material needs to be backed up somewhere other than on your main hard drive. In the event of a computer crash, you don’t want to lose important material – business documents, photos, personal memories and so on. These can all be backed up onto your computer’s little helpers: external drives, flashdrives or ‘the cloud’. I have used flashdrives (otherwise known as memory sticks and several other names) a lot because I could take them round the world with me, slung on a lanyard around my neck. Things have changed: I would rely more on ‘the cloud’ now.

      For editing, you will have Track Changes or some other editing tool. It is helpful in that you can keep track of the alterations you make to a document, and allow the client to see exactly what you recommend cutting out or altering, whereupon they can choose to accept or reject your recommendations. While you’re working you can save various versions of the document, retrieve material from previous versions, change your mind about alterations you make, rearrange the placement of illustrations on pages (such as graphs, tables, photographs, text quotes from elsewhere), change colours of fonts and backgrounds – the choices are seemingly endless.

      If you have a lot of spreadsheets to do, there’s Excel. And PowerPoint is a great tool for designing conference slide-show presentations.

      And don’t forget multi-tasking. You can interrupt whatever you are doing and do something else – open and answer mail while in the middle of writing a report, redesign your company logo if you want to, as a break from editing an annual report, and so on. You can help this along by investing in a wide enough monitor that will allow you to have two versions of a document on screen at once, both of which you can manipulate, or be working on two completely different tasks at once. And with broadband, everything can be achieved so much more quickly than was possible with dial-up internet access.

      Please don’t heave the computer through the window just yet – it can help a lot, but do remember to keep it up to date and then learn how to use the updates yourself.

      4. On-screen editing

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      Here is the answer to how to use Microsoft Word’s Track Changes, Find and Replace, Styles and other editing tools. It was delightful to find Michele Sabto’s very handy little book called The on-screen editing handbook (see ‘References’). The book is not new – it was published by Tertiary Press in Victoria in 2003 – but the information is so clearly set out that I would recommend it to anyone taking up on-screen editing for the first time, or wanting to brush up on some of the topics in the book. It’s very compact: 89 A5 pages, crammed with screen images or ‘dumps’ to illustrate points, and full of step-by-step instructions for doing just about everything. Although it’s based on a much older version of Word (Word 2000), many aspects of Word’s functionality are much the same. I have since moved on to Word 2007 with no difficulty, and would not expect any problem transferring to a later incarnation of Word.

      For newcomers to on-screen editing, the first thing you need to know is that the built-in spelling and grammar check facilities are next to useless. The spelling check, for instance, will happily allow there, their and they’re in situations where only one of those is correct. Why? Spellcheck can only spell – it can’t tell the difference between those words contextually. It will recommend who’s as a replacement for whose when whose was correct in the first place. Spellcheck will pick up a ‘spelling error’ in the expression mind your p’s and q’s and suggest changing p’s to any one of a number of options like: pHs, ape’s, pass, pes, puss. It doesn’t like q’s either but can only come up with one suggestion: EQ’s.

      The grammar check will pull me up at the sentence in the paragraph above: The book is not new – it was published by Tertiary Press in Victoria in 2003 – but the information … It doesn’t like the passive and wants to change it to Tertiary Press in Victoria published it in 2003. Fair enough, but any competent editor knows that it’s just as silly to cram a document with active voice as with passive voice – variety is the spice of effective writing. These devices have their uses merely as checks for typos or to help in your thinking about a grammatical construction that may be unwieldy. They should not be used as the sole editing tools, and a client should understand that using these tools will not obviate the need for an editor.

      The book is divided into six chapters, starting with Chapter 1 ‘Managing files’. This is an aspect of on-screen editing that a lot of people don’t think 15 about until they find they have a mess of files scattered throughout their emails and other Word documents, in ‘My documents’, ‘My briefcase’, and perhaps even in a file labelled with the client’s name. But logically, file management should come first, as it does in this book. A simple procedure is suggested, based on the blindingly obvious: new job – new folder. Then the reader is warned about the dangers of not filing absolutely everything – files can easily get lost. It was gratifying to discover that my filing methods are pretty close to the recommendation – first make a copy of whatever the client sends you and keep one version untouched as a reference and use the other as the first working version. Keep that pattern of behaviour up, and you should arrive at the end of the job with a complete progressive picture of how the job proceeded, right up to and including a final version ready for the printer.

      I remember once being asked by a regular client whether I’d kept a complete file of all stages of the edit, as they had lost their files in some sort of catastrophe. Yes, they were all stored safely, and the missing documents could be sent to the client to restore their own files to what they should have been. That was a lesson to all – it was impressed upon me to be meticulous about keeping files complete and always up to date. At the end of every job, my practice is to transfer everything in that folder – all stages of the edit, correspondence, copies of invoices and other files – to a CD. Usually, it is then possible to shred paper records and delete the files from the computer, but even those are kept for a while – just in case of another catastrophe. (It would be nice to be able to say the same for my hard-copy personal filing system, which currently needs a bulldozer through it!)

      Chapter 2 of the book deals with ‘Removing redundant spacing’ – like what? Well, to start with, extra spaces after punctuation: many authors were taught (as I was) to type two spaces after end punctuation and one elsewhere, but the norm today is one space after all punctuation, both to keep it simple and to avoid problems when full justification is used (huge spaces can appear after full stops as text is dragged across to the right-hand margin). This is where the Find and Replace feature comes in handy: if you haven’t found it yet, it’s in the Edit menu, Home tab or Navigation pane. Select Replace and position the cursor in the Find What textbox – if we’re changing double spacing after just full stops, for example, type a full stop followed by two spaces. Now place the cursor in the Replace With textbox and type a full stop followed by one space. Now click the Replace All button, and watch the magic happen before your eyes. A message will tell you how many times the alteration was made in the document. You can use this feature for all manner of global alterations, such as changing all double quotes to single quotes, one 16 kind of dash to another, all spellings of an unfamiliar name from the wrong spelling to the correct spelling, and so on.

      The matter of ‘styles’ in on-screen editing preparatory to publication was always a bit of a mystery to me in my early days of editing. Sometimes sorting out styles is forced on you when you receive an editing job that has already been gone over by someone else who has set certain styles that seem inappropriate, or that are haphazard. Some publishers have templates of styles that you must adhere to, but more often than not, you need to set your own. Chapter 3 ‘Creating and applying styles’ sets out clearly how to go about it. For those who are new to this, there is a hierarchy