Use the Find function to polish your writing

Nothing replaces proper proofreading but these quick tips will add an extra professional touch to your writing:

• While proofreading long documents, make a note of clichés and words or phrases you use too often – the Find function will help you search for and eliminate them later.
• Search for bland words – ‘put’, ‘get’, ‘has’, ‘did’, ‘went’. Replace them with synonyms that are more descriptive with nuances to capture the flavour of your meaning more precisely.  For example, ‘put’ (and variations such as ‘put down’ and ‘put back’) can be replaced with ‘placed’, ‘laid’, ‘set’, ‘dropped’, ‘packed’ and so on. A thesaurus is useful here but don’t replace words just for the sake of it – sometimes ‘put’ will be the best choice.
• Search for commonly confused words: it’s and its; effect and affect; practice and practise; and so on. Find all instances of these in the document and double-check they have been used correctly (an easy way to do this is to substitute a synonym and see if the sentence still makes sense).
• Do a Find-and-Replace on double spacing. This most commonly occurs at the end of paragraphs. Enter in two spaces in ‘Find’ and a single space in ‘Replace with’.  Run this twice to get rid of the occasional triple space.
  Note: if you type double spaces at the beginning of sentences as a hangover from the old typewriting days, you can use this method with three spaces in Find and two spaces in Replace but please remember additional spaces after periods are not necessary when using word-processing programs.
• If writing dialogue, Find-and-Replace on errors in the use of quotation marks – search for mistakes such as: . ” and  .“ and variations of these (for example, with commas rather than periods).
• The Find function also allows searching/replacing on formatting including font type, style and size, paragraph properties and paragraph and character styles. This is useful if, for example, you need to replace all instances of italics in your document with bold (Just specify the formatting but leave the “Find what” box blank).