Every editor who works in Word should review all of the options at least once and decide which ones to turn off. Though Word’s AutoCorrect options are turned on by default in a brand-new installation, it’s easy to disable them. In fact, whenever you put your cursor into a document and start typing, AutoCorrect can take over. Nothing bad will happen.īut you do need to worry about any change you make to the document, no matter how minor: just hitting the space bar can trigger an automatic correction.
So you don’t need to worry about simply opening a Word document-even on a computer with different AutoCorrect options. This happens only when you specifically launch the AutoFormat command, which is safely hidden in the deeper recesses of the program (see below).ĪutoCorrect goes to work only after some form of input from the user. And quotation marks-they’ll go from straight to curly so fast you probably won’t even notice. Or a new paragraph starting with “1.” will gain an indent and become the first item in an automatically numbered list (like this one)-as soon as you hit the space bar. This means that a “(c)” will turn into a “©” as soon as you enter the closing parenthesis. When Word’s AutoCorrect options are turned on, they work in one of two ways: How It Works, and Why That Matters for Editors But that strategy works only if your attention never lapses, and it requires an extra step. Undo-possibly the greatest innovation in the history of computing-will fix most of these things as soon as they happen. Nor do we want to capitalize the first letter of the first word in a table cell-sometimes, yes, but not in every last case.Īnd the French preposition dont in the original-language quotation that we’re trying to add per the author’s handwritten instructions? Please, don’t change it to the English contraction. That means we don’t want a “(c)” in an enumerated list turning into a copyright symbol.* What We Don’t WantĬopyeditors generally don’t want anything we haven’t specifically asked for. Copyeditors are hired to turn an author’s final manuscript into a document that’s ready to publish, right down to the last character.įor those of us who get a thrill from life’s nuances, copyediting can be a rewarding job-until a mistake makes it into a published piece that you supposedly edited. And if you use smart quotes, you’ll definitely need some help.īut to a copyeditor, Word’s meddling can be dangerous. If you’re writing more than a few words, it’s nice when you don’t have to stop for every typo or to add an apostrophe or apply caps to a letter that you missed. Microsoft Word does a lot of things automatically, and it does them by default.
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