editing

I've been spending much of my time lately in copy- and format-editing for the batch of papers in this year's Tolkien Studies. Besides the substantive editing - making sure the prose makes sense and is grammatical, that the sources are quoted correctly and cited accurately, etc. - there are some matters of format editing that I go through with every paper, some of them by global (or sequential individual) find-and-replace. Here's some of those and how they work in Word.

1. Ellipses. An ellipsis is three dots, but in Word it's a single character with three dots in it, which will be generated if you type three dots in a row, but it doesn't happen if you type dot-space-dot-space-dot. Fix those. Also, we don't follow MLA's briefly-held policy from years ago of putting brackets around supplied ellipses. Most ellipses are supplied, and if there are any in what you're quoting, a note "ellipses in original" next to the in-line citation is sufficient.

2. Hyphens and dashes. A dash in text is an em-dash without spaces around it. That can be fixed manually. Date and page ranges are an en-dash, but people usually use a hyphen. I find the easiest way to deal with this is a global search-and-replace for hyphens, going through the whole paper and hitting the "replace" or "next" buttons as needed. And yes, a journal whose issue is "Fall-Winter 2021", that's a date range.

3. Tabs. Even authors who use the Word paragraphing function of first-line indent, which is what we want, absently indent occasional paragraphs with the tab key. A simple Find search for the tab character (^t in the search box) will locate all of those.

4. Extra spaces. Not just double-spacing between sentences, which isn't actually that common, but weird extra spaces at the end or start of paragraphs. The paragraph break is ^p in search boxes, so [space]^p finds extra spaces at the end of paragraphs and ^p[space] finds them at the start. Hit "replace all" with a simple ^p and they're done. Do it twice in case there were two spaces. For double spacing, "replace all" of [space][space] with [space] does the same trick.

There are other things to watch for, like manual-typewriter style straight quotes, but that gives the idea.