Streamlining Hard-Copy Revisions

One thing I repeatedly tell my students about their writing is the value of revising, editing, and proof-reading a hard copy. It always amazes me how much more critically I can look at a printed page than at a computer screen. But this advice should be no great shock to any experienced writer.

What this post is really about is how to take the changes you've marked on your hard copy and enter them into your word processor. Maybe I was the only one doing it the hard way for years, but everyone I've asked has said that they do it like I used to--they start at the beginning and work their way through to the end.

This is how I edited my first few dissertation chapters. But executing the changes I'd already made on paper took forever because the location of words on the page kept changing as the material above became longer or shorter with my revisions. This was supposed to be a mindless, mechanical task, but I found myself reading the entire draft over again to find the places I'd marked to revise.

Then I had a breakthrough. I realized that if I started at the end of the document, the changes would only affect the position of what I had already fixed. In short, everything stayed put on the page until I got there, making it so much easier to find the problem areas and make my corrections.

Maybe this is how you've been doing revisions all along, but if not, you will be shocked how much time you can save.

Auto-Alphabetize Your Works Cited

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!