THERE’S NO ARGUING with the fact that we are all moving towards a more digital world. Most of us communicate almost exclusively through digital means when we aren’t face-to-face. We get our news, follow our favorite sports teams, and ask questions in the digital realm. Which leads me to a […]
WRITERS, STORYTELLERS, SINGERS, AND ARTISTS all have one thing in common: we want our work to be a unique expression of who we are as individuals. We want some aspect of our personality, our worldview, our inner selves or “souls” to be perceived in our art. The trick is learning […]
SO YOU STARTED THE YEAR OUT STRONG. You created your big rock goals, developed an action plan for accomplishing those goals and scheduled time on your calendar. You review your plan frequently to keep yourself motivated. Sure, you’re not perfect, but you’re making progress, and that’s what counts. In fact, […]
WRITING REQUIRES WRITING TOOLS. Sure, those tools can be as simple as a notebook and a pen or pencil, but for many (if not most) of us, our writing tool belt also includes word processing, note-taking, and journaling applications, as well as programs that assist with other writing tasks from […]
IF YOU’VE BEEN WRITING ANY LENGTH OF TIME, you’ve probably heard of Scrivener. And if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a big fan. I use Scrivener for pretty much all my writing these days: blog posts, short works, such as essays and […]
I WANT to let you in on a secret: Word’s Find and Replace feature is an indispensable editing tool. Here are just a few ways you can use Find/Replace to improve your writing: Revise passive to active verb construction Find useless adverbs Discover unnecessary prepositional phrases Correct simple formatting problems, such […]
WHEN A WRITER HAS NOT YET LEARNED how to use Styles, she applies formatting manually. For example, to format a title, she might select the title, apply bold formatting, make it a slightly larger font size, and center it. Applying formatting in this manner is called “direct formatting.” If you […]
OF ALL THE FEATURES offered by word processing programs, you may be most familiar with formatting text and paragraphs — commonly changing fonts, bolding, italicizing, and underlining. In its essence, formatting involves selecting text and then applying a format command using menus or buttons. In this article, I’ll show you […]
IF YOU’VE BEEN following this series, understand of how page and section breaks can help you organize your document. Today, I’m going to give you an overview of how to handle headers, footers, and page numbering. And because I’m writing this series with writers in mind, I’m going to focus […]
IN PART 7 OF WORD FOR WRITERS, I covered how to manage page breaks. Today, we’ll talk about section breaks. Many people work with Word for years without ever understanding or using Word’s sections. This may be due to the fact that many Word documents are only a single section. In […]
Many writers know how to read comments that have been added to a document in Microsoft Word; however I’ve discovered that many do not know how to add comments of their own, or remove comments once added. So they add comments by inserting a different color text into the body […]
Working collaboratively with other writers or with editors requires knowing how to use the tools under Word’s Review Tab — particularly how to effectively use Track Changes and Comments. If you have felt intimidated by the idea of learning these features, you can now relax. It’s easier than it looks. […]
