This is a first: I thought I'd discovered every way to procrastinate, but I've never attempted to procrastinate by creating a blog. I hate figuring out neat shortcuts in Word but not having anyone to share them with. So here it is, a tip on alphabetizing a large MLA bibliography:
My list of Works Cited has many instances of "---." for multiple works by the same author (MLA style). At first, this prevented me from using Word's automatic sort function. (Here's what Microsoft has to say about it.) All of the lines beginning with "---." would get separated from the other works by that author.
Here's the solution: First, do a search and replace where you replace ^p--- with &&&&& (or some other line of characters you won't have used elsewhere). This will group all the works of one author together so you can sort alphabetically. Then, just reverse the find and replace, replacing &&&&& with ^p---, and everything will go back to normal.
One caveat. MLA wants you to list works by a single author before works where that author leads a list of names. So "Smith, John." would come before "Smith, John, and Jenny Jones." The automatic sort will not do this properly. Entries beginning with symbols or articles will also have to be arranged manually. But otherwise, sorting a long bibliography automatically can save a lot of time!
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