6 Find and Replace Tricks That Will Trip You Up
Find and Replace is magic!
Instead of spending hours searching and changing individual words with the near certainty you’ll miss just one instance in the most embarrassing place possible, you can, with just a few clicks, make a much more embarrassing oversight.
Let’s say you needed to change “lb” to “pound” everywhere, Find and Replace seems like it’s saved you a lot of epoundow grease. Wait…oh.
How about the decision to expand “PM” to “project manager” for readability? Pity you now have meetings at “3:30 project manager.” And perhaps you needed to protect Chris’s identity during the festive period and suddenly you’re sending Merry Billtmas messages…
Those are real-life examples, well, maybe hiding Chris’s identity at Christmas isn’t a real example, but it paints a picture. The find-and-replace magic is powerful but should be used carefully. A single click of the mouse can be the difference between a word wizard and a sorcerer’s apprentice.
Here are six cautionary tales for your edification.
The renamed role
A creator at a role-playing games company decided that “mage” was unimpressive and too uncommon a word, thus decreeing that the role would instead be “wizard.” The game materials were nearly ready to go, so the change needed to be done quickly!
What the sorcerer’s apprentice did
“That’s easy! We’ll just do a quick replace-all from mage to wizard.” A quick-fix that caused so much dawizard was done to the company’s iwizard…
What a word wizard can do
Tell Find and Replace to match “whole word only,” and don’t use “Replace All”; check each location one by one. It may seem tedious, but it can save a lot of trouble and embarrassment.
Top tip: remember to search for all variations, such as “mages.” With PerfectIt, you can add “mage” and “wizard” to your preferences and see everything in context. Plus, if you use Styleworks, our free tool for creating style sheets and house styles, you can log all your preferences there and upload the style sheet to PerfectIt.
2. The abbreviation vacillation
In a new cookbook, it was noticed that sometimes, ingredients were listed with the word “ounces” spelled out, and sometimes it was abbreviated as “oz.” Which way should it be for consistency? The decision was made to spell it out everywhere. But within a few hours, someone realized that many other units were abbreviated, so spelling it out might make the text no longer fit in some places. So, as is often the case, a new decision was made to abbreviate everywhere!
What the sorcerer’s apprentice did
“Heck, where else would “oz” even show up? Change all! Wait… what? OK, change all in the other direction!” And so it was that the second change kept the readers from seeing “2 douncesen eggs” but in the anecdote that went with this particular recipe, the reader was left reading “boz” instead of “bounces” and wondering what was going on.
What a word wizard can do
First, conduct a full spellcheck. Second, specify “whole word only” (and hope no typo was left behind). Third, set it to match case (depending on your version of Word and how you do the search, this may mean checking “Match case” or unchecking “Ignore Case”).
3. The sweeping localization
A publisher had a US book to Canadianize. This meant changing the spelling on a list of words that UK and Australian publishers will also be familiar with including, color to colour, favor to favour, meter to metre, and localizing a few terms like changing “state” authorities to “provincial” authorities.
What the sorcerer’s apprentice did
“No problem! I have a macro that does all the spelling replacements in a flash, and I’ll just add those bits of localization to it, like changing ‘state’ to ‘provincial.’” Alas, the results were not underprovinciald and they were instead bound for the book cemetrey.
What a word wizard can do
PerfectIt users can set their chosen style to Canadian Spelling which will run a series of checks, identifying every questionable spelling, letting you review and change each one (even the instances you might have forgotten about). Specify terms to watch out for and PerfectIt will find them and let you fix them efficiently without touching inappropriate matches.
4. The problem person
The office was buzzing with gossip when the former vice president of operations, Michael Randall, resigned abruptly. They were replaced by Michelle Patel just as the annual report was being finalized. References throughout the report needed to be changed ASAP!
What the sorcerer’s apprentice did
“That’s a simple swap! I’ll do a search of “Randall” and change every instance one by one, including the first name where it appears.” Too bad the CEO’s letter referred to all the senior executives just by first name. Michelle wasn’t too happy being referred to as “Mike” and thought she shouldn’t have been credited with choosing the new decor for the men’s washrooms.
What a word wizard can do
Word wizards do things manually when it’s faster and more reliable. If you have PerfectIt, you can set a usage note on “Michael,” “Randall,” and the variations of both. PerfectIt will find all instances and remind you what to be aware of and why, making manual changes faster and easier.
5. The haughty hyphenation
An academic author referred repeatedly to the “Governor-General of Canada” but, some of the quotations had “governor general.” The quotations had it right: it’s not officially hyphenated, and The Chicago Manual of Style says that unless it’s modifying a person’s name (e.g., Governor General Mary Simon), it’s lower-case.
What the sorcerer’s apprentice did
“I’ve got the ultimate time-saver here! I’ll use a wildcard and change “Governor-General” to “governor general” except when it’s followed by a word that starts with a capital letter. And in those cases, I’ll change it to “Governor General”! I’m a real wizard now!” Unfortunately, the sorcerer’s apprentice hadn’t considered all the places the book still referred to “Governors-General.”
What a word wizard can do
When you run a PerfectIt check, it automatically looks at variants of hyphenation, capitalization, and pluralization. As you work through each check, it will ask you which you prefer. If some quoted material does not follow your style sheet, you can skip fixing those instances.
6. The inconsistent character
The novelist was great at casting spells with their stories, but not so great at spelling... The lead character was named inconsistently referred to in various ways: Catherine, Catharine, Katherine, Katharine, Kathryn, and Kathyrn… and Cathy, Kathy, Kate, Cate, and Cait.
What the sorcerer’s apprentice did
“OK, I see we have “Catharine” and “Katharine” and “Cathy” and “Kathy,” so I’ll just change all “Cat” to “Kat”… Oh, wait. I guess now I have to change “Katherine” to “Katharine”… Wait, “Cait”? Aw, you gotta be kidding me!” Alas, even after all that work, there were still problems. Kat paws dotted the manuscript and “Kathyrn” still lurked in the shadows. What a katastrophe!
What a word wizard can do
Great editors keep track of character names and each variation of them in a style sheet while going through a novel. At the end of the first pass, a decision can be made on which to use, and then it’s a matter of going through and fixing all the others… with a little hope you didn’t miss a variant.
With Styleworks, an author can build their novel’s preferences to refer to throughout the manuscript. And if you use PerfectIt, you can upload the style sheet to conduct your consistency checks against. You can set it to watch for variants of “Katherine” and “Kathy,” finding words that are similar and list them.
Magic may not be real, but these mistakes are!
How many times have you had a little chuckle to yourself when you’ve seen these mistakes in the wild? It’s ok, we all do it.
But these sorry tales are based on actual mishaps, several of which made it into print. All it takes is a single find-and-replace error to confuse your readers, get a proposal rejected, or force an expensive reprint.
It happens to the best of us. The difference between a sorcerer’s apprentice and a word wizard isn’t always years of experience; many of these blunders were made by professional editors. Often, it’s literally just a single mouse-click that anyone can forget, especially when under time pressure. In fact, a time-crunch is exactly when you’re least likely to have another pair of eyes review a piece to catch anything that may have been missed.
The best way to keep it from happening to you is to avoid the Replace All button and don’t click-click-click through Find and Replace by reflex, either. Checking each one may feel tedious and take a little longer, but it’s nothing compared to fixing a major disaster. Familiarize yourself with options such as “whole word only” and “match case.” Wildcards can help you control the powerful magic, but make sure you really know what you’re doing.
At Intelligent Editing, we pride ourselves on creating tools editors, writers, and translators can use to help with their workflows.
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