Typo-Busting Power Tools
The last chapter introduced you to Pages as the faithful transcriber of your words, an able assistant for capturing your ideas and juggling them into presentable shape. Like any good assistant, though, Pages does more than just take down your words—it helps you edit your words, quietly fixes typos, and even helps you proofread your work.
Changing Your Mind: Find & Replace
Whether you’re completing your 400-page novel or just polishing a three-page letter, you often have to change a word, a phrase, or even just a character that appears repeatedly throughout the text. For example, as newsletter editor for Up & Away, Megaville’s leading outfitter for superheroes, you’ve been asked to write a book, Fighting Crime with Super Powers: The Missing Manual. As you zoom into your final chapters, your editor asks you to make a few changes:
- You use Captain Fantastic as an example throughout the book, but the famously litigious hero threatened to sue to protect his action-figure and theme-park trademarks. Now you have to change all 273 mentions of Captain Fantastic to Mister Nice Guy, a lesser known but less lawyer-prone hero.
- The word “Kryptonite” is capitalized, who knew? Not you, unfortunately, and now you have to fix your many lowercase lapses.
- Your personal Kryptonite is spelling—throughout the book you’ve confused heroin (a drug) with heroine (a female hero), a slip certain to irritate your female following…and copy editors everywhere.
- Half your mentions of ...