The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 2: Microsoft Word Ate My Manuscript!
Steve Beisner -- January 31, 2006
If you're like most professional writers, you use Microsoft Word, and this may sound familiar: You've set the font, page margins, paragraph indentation, and other formating exactly the way you want; then something happens and your carefully crafted masterpiece is transformed into gibberish that could have been typed by your four year old nephew. Your paragraphs are reformatted, spelling "corrected," punctuation modified, alignment changed, and new headings created. Welcome to Microsoft Word Hell. In this installment of The Silicon Amanuensis you'll learn how to tell Word that you're a grownup; if you want your manuscript messed up, you'll do it yourself.
Installments of The Silicon Amanuensis:
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 1: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 2: Microsoft Word Ate My Manuscript!
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 3: With Microsoft Word It's a Matter of Style
The Silicon Amanuensis, Part 4: A Microsoft Word Template: Order From Chaos
Before I begin suggesting fixes, let me assure you I'm not picking on Microsoft Word alone: the problem of overly agressive "assistance" inflicted upon the poor hard-working writer exists to some extent in most word processors.
The Problem
Once upon a time there were many word processors competing with each other for the affection of computer users. Besides MS Word, there was Word Perfect, Framemaker, Ami Word, and many others. Competition was fierce. Companies engaged in price warfare. Microsoft would practically give you a copy of Word if you could prove you were switching from someone else's product. Makers of word processors also tried to out-do each other by adding nifty new features to their products.
What could be better? New features mean a constantly improving product, right? Well, no. Turns out that the essentials of word processing have been pretty much agreed upon by everyone since the Wang Corporation figured things out in the 1970s. Adding all those "helpful" new features only made word processors more complicated. To make it easier for sales people to demonstrate the latest word processor whiz-bang to potential customers, most of the annoying "extras" are turned on by default. So if you don't explicitly turn off all these little helpers, you'll soon reach the conclusion that your word processor is broken: haunted, possessed, psychotic, or tripped out, depending on your favorite brand of superstition.
This brings us to,
The Solution
Turn 'em off. Turn all of the little genius helpers off, all the way off. Trust me, your sanity and time is worth more than these "convenient features". It'd be nice if there was a single option you could set that said, "I'm an adult. Please do not try to improve my work for me." Unfortunately no word processor I've seen has such a setting. Instead one has to navigate through menus, dialog boxes, options inside options, hunting down and mercilessly assassinating each of the perpetrators.
The good news is that once you've killed the villains they'll stay dead... mostly. This article is too short to explain "normal templates" and other things involved in how this works, but MS Word may resurrect the bad guys from time to time. For this reason you might want to print out this article for future reference.
I've also included instructions on setting other options that will make MS Word a little more comfortable or safer, even if the option is not directly related to the "much too helpful" problem.
First some terminology. A sequence like Tools|Options|View means a series of menu and sub-menu selections. In this case it would mean select the Tools menu, then the Options submenu, then the View submenu or tab. These instructions should work on versions of Word running on Windows 95 or later or on any version of Apple Mac OS-X.
Ready? Open up a manuscript. After we set the options the way we want we'll save the manuscript, which will cause Word to automatically save our changed options to a special file called the "Normal Template". If all goes well, the changes will be available to our future uses of Word.
Retain normal meanings for TAB and Backspace keys. For Windows: Tools|Options|Edit. For Apple: Word|Preferences|Edit. Uncheck the option "Tabs and Backspace Set Left Indent." Hopefully the reason is obvious: you want these keys to retain their normal meaning, not change the formating when you're just trying to delete a character or insert a tab!
Turn off grammar correction. For Windows: Tools|Options|Spelling And Grammar. For Apple: Word|Preferences|Spelling And Grammar. Turn off all the options for grammar checking and correction. Especially for writers of fiction, almost all the grammar "corrections" will be bogus, anyway. On the other hand, you may want to turn "check spelling as you type" on or off... some people like it others don't.
Speaking of spell checking: make sure the correct language is set. For Windows or Apple: Edit|Select All, then Tools|Language. If spell checking doesn't seem to be working, it often means that the language for some part of the document is set to "none" or "no proofing" or the wrong language. This setting sticks to a particular document file, so fixing it for one manuscript doesn't mean it won't turn up elsewhere. After selecting the entire manuscript and invoking the Language dialog, pick the correct language, e.g. "English(US)".
Turn off automatic hyphenation. For Windows or Apple: Tools|Hyphenation. Uncheck the option to automatically insert hyphens into your manuscript.
Turn off "auto correct" For Windows or Apple: Tools|AutoCorrect|AutoCorrect. The idea of auto correct is to fix your stupid mistakes: you type "peice" and Word changes it to "piece". Sounds attractive to the lazy, but it can do untold damage and make you look like an idiot. Uncheck all the boxes here.
Turn off "auto format as you type" For Windows or Apple: Tools|AutoCorrect|Auto Format As You Type. I turn off everything here, too. If you prefer "curly" quotation marks, you might want to leave enabled the option to replace straight quotes with "smart quotes." Same with the option to replace "--" with a real dash character.
Turn off "auto text" For Windows or Apple: Tools|AutoCorrect|AutoText. Turn off everything. This is another ill-considered feature to second guess the writer in a most intrusive way.
Turn off "auto format" For Windows or Apple: Tools|AutoCorrect|Auto Format. Pretty much the same as "auto format as you type." You should set these options to match those of the "... as you type" options.
Now that you've made these changes, don't forget to save your document. The next time you use MS Word, you should have fewer unpleasant surprises.
Check Ink Byte soon for the next installment of The Silicon Amanuensis.