Things to not do when using your word processor

Is something missing or wrong? Please contact me and I’ll fix the problem.

There are many things you can do while you’re typing that waste your time and make it harder to clean up your manuscript before it’s ready to publish. These are Things You Should Not Do while you type. Many of the resulting problems can be solved by editing the paragraph style that defines how a piece of text is formatted or by using the search and replace function. (See Chapter 6 for details of editing styles. See Chapter 12 for details of using the search function.) The problems and solutions include:

Typing double spaces after a sentence: Just about nobody does this anymore, since it unbalances the spacing between words in a paragraph and serves no useful purpose. If you have to work with someone who requires double spaces, it’s easy enough to use a search and replace to add the extra spaces. Simply search for the end-of-sentence punctuation marks (periods, exclamations, and question marks) and globally replace them with the same mark followed by a space.
Adding a blank space between paragraphs using Enter or Return: If the space is necessary, edit the paragraph style applied to the text to include “spacing before”, “spacing after”, or a combination of both. If you have to work with someone who requires a blank line between paragraphs, you can add the spaces using search and replace. Simply search for ^p (the end-of-paragraph marker) and globally replace it with ^p^p (two end-of-paragraph markers). If you only want to make this change for part of the manuscript, select that part before you perform the replacement.
Using a tab or spaces to indent the first line of a paragraph: Instead, define the size of the indent by editing the properties of the paragraph style applied to the text. You can delete these spaces by searching for ^p (the end-of-paragraph marker) followed by one or more spaces (if you typed spaces) or by ^t (if you used tabs), and globally replace these search terms with ^p. Then edit the style properties to add the required first-line indent.
Moving a heading to a new page by repeatedly pressing the Return or Enter key: Instead, edit the properties of the heading’s paragraph style to include a page break before the heading.
Aligning columns of text by typing tabs: Although this can work for simple situations, it’s faster and more effective to use a table instead. See my article “Mastering Word’s tables” for details. http://geoff-hart.com/articles/2013/word-tables.html
Manually formatting headings: Instead, define a heading style for each level of heading. After you have applied the correct heading style, remove any unnecessary manual formatting by selecting the heading text and pressing Control/Command+Shift+Z. Note that “unnecessary” does not mean relevant formatting such as italics.
Autonumbering: Word’s built-in numbered styles (styles with names that begin “List Number”) sometimes gets confused, leading to gaps in the numbering or incorrectly restarting numbering at 1. The solution is to define your own styles (e.g., GeoffNumberList) and edit their properties so that they are not “based on” any of Word’s built-in styles. However, because changes that affect numbering can be messy if you’re using revision tracking to work with reviewers or an editor, you may want to suggest that your reviewers or editor add comments to describe suggested changes in numbering (rather than actually tracking the changes).
Using too many paragraph and character styles: Most manuscripts will be easier to read if you limit yourself to 3 levels of heading and 4 types of body text (body text with a first-line indent, body text with no first-line indent, indented or centered paragraphs for notes and quotes, bullet lists). You can definitely add more, but fewer is generally better. The main exception is for complex technical documents, for which multiple levels of numbered headings (e.g., 2.1.3.4.5 A Level-5 Heading) may be acceptable.

If you have other suggestions, send them to me and I’ll update this list!