By Jill McCaw
I knew nothing about macros before I took Paul Beverley’s course, which IPEd organised last year.
I work predominantly in aviation journalism, writing and editing in this field. Aviation uses a lot of esoteric terms and acronyms.
I had no idea macros could be so useful – I thought I had my practice well organised. The first thing I would do, on nearly every piece I edited, was run a find/replace to change double spaces to single spaces (there are always some). Sometimes I did this up to 3 times before it made no more changes.
In aviation, height above the ground is usually given in feet. Many people in the industry still use the old abbreviation for feet – the single quote (5000′). As most modern readers don’t know what the single quote means, I’d search for single quote marks and manually change each appropriate one to the word “feet”. Then I’d get started on editing the piece.
There’s a macro called FRedit that does all that and more. FRedit stands for Find Replace Edit. It’s a global program that you customise for your work. To use it, you turn on track changes (so you don’t miss any changes to the document that aren’t correct) and then run FRedit before you start work.
I now have FRedit set up to:
- remove extraneous spaces
- change straight quotes to curly quotes (my magazine’s style)
- replace two hyphens with an en dash
- change compass points (e.g. northeast) to two words with a hyphen (north-east) (my magazine’s style)
- remove the extraneous comma some people put in four-digit numbers
- change a single quote mark to “feet” if it is used after a number
- run through a list of aviation-related words and correct them to my magazine’s house style (e.g. touch down to touchdown)
- correct the spelling of Māori place names that are spelt with macrons.
I learnt early on not to ask FRedit to change NZ to New Zealand. If the Mackenzie Basin is mentioned in the text, you get a very interesting result.
Of course, if you ask FRedit to replace things that aren’t in your document, nothing will happen. But you’ll also know you don’t need to be alert for those issues when you work through the text.
Macros are little pieces of computer code that make your work easier. FRedit is something you only run once for each document. There are other macros you use to analyse the work before you start. The one I’ve found most useful is ProperNounAlyse. It finds all the proper nouns in a document and shows you if there are any inconsistencies. For instance, you could have the name “Stephens” appear 3 times and the name “Stevens” 4 times. This means you need to check if they refer to the same or different people (or places) and that the correct spelling has been used each time. Other analysis macros (e.g. hyphens, acronyms and word pairs) can also be useful to run on a document before you start work.
There are many other simpler macros to use as you work through a text. Changing the first letter of a word to lowercase is something I seem to do a lot. Many older folks throw an abundance of capital letters into their stories. I now have a macro for that, which I set up with a keyboard shortcut (I use Alt+C). I put my cursor on the word, hit the shortcut and the macro changes the capitalisation of the first letter. Likewise, I have a macro that changes text to number and another for number to text. I can use macros to add macrons or acutes to vowels, as I need them.
These all make my work quicker. That is what macros are all about – they make your work quicker and cleaner. As I said in my title, I wish I’d known this 20 years ago.
Just a disclaimer, if you study macros with Paul Beverley, you don’t learn how to set up FRedit until his second course, but what you learn in the first course is still enlightening and useful. Paul has created macros for just about every repetitive editing task you can imagine. There are hundreds of them. Once you know how to set them up on your computer, you’ll never look back.
I’m a convert.
Author bio: Jill McCaw
Jill McCaw is an award-winning aviation journalist and editor. She is currently completing work on a book, tentatively titled: Further, faster, higher: the history of gliding in New Zealand. It will be published in 2027. She writes and copyedits for the magazine Kiwi Flyer and was the editor of SoaringNZ, the official journal of Gliding New Zealand, for 12 years.