![]() You can find them at the bottom of this article. If you want to use multiple colors (Margie’s EDITS system?) and isolate one color at a time, a reader of Abigail Hilton’s wrote in with instructions for Open Office. That’s my new method for hunting down backstory and other pesky verbiage. ![]() The status bar shows the word count for that selection and for the entire document. ![]() For a partial word count, select the words you want to count. Do they make sense in isolation? Which facts in here are crucial to the reader’s understanding of the story? Which are just ‘enhancers’? Remove anything extraneous from your working draft. When you need to know how many words, pages, characters, paragraphs, or lines are in a document, check the status bar. For the first 50 pages, aim for 500 words or fewer. Calculate what percentage of your total document is backstory. Your document should now look similar to this, showing only highlighted words: Keep selecting Highlight until you see Format: Not Highlight. The line of text beneath the Find What box (Format) will toggle between the three states for Highlight. Save a new copy, noting that this document will only contain highlighted text. Return to your original highlighted document (or CTRL/CMD+Z to undo what you just did). If it’s obvious there’s something important missing, or the text doesn’t make sense without the backstory, you can keep it. This is the acid test: does your story still make sense without those extra words? If so, you don’t need the backstory and you can delete it. You can now run a word count, and read through your document without backstory included. Save a copy of this document, with a note that all the highlights are gone. Highlighted text that was part of its own paragraph leaves an empty space behind. You may want to remove these manually, or leave them in. Note that where highlighted text was part of a sentence, it leaves behind a tch of highlighting (a yellow bar). Your document should now look similar to this: Your Find What box should now look like this with a line for Format beneath the box:Ĭlick inside the Replace With box to select it. This Format > Highlight option toggles between three states: Highlight, Not Highlight, and null/blank/don’t care. Open the Replace dialogue box (CTRL+H on Windows, else CTRL/CMD+F and choose the Replace tab).Ĭlick inside the Find What box to select it.Ĭlick on the More> button to expand the options.Īt the bottom of the expanded options, click on the Format button. 2) Find & Replace All Highlights (Remove Highlighted Text) Save a copy, marked as “backstory highlights” or some such. Do you have lots of highlights? Are they evenly distributed, or do they form big clumps or pools? This is a good way to get a feel for how your backstory has been distributed. Zoom out (hold mouse button and use scroll button is quickest), and see what your document looks like as a whole. (Word can’t differentiate between colors.) Do an Eyeball Check The color you choose doesn’t matter, but you can only use one color for this exercise. In MS Word the highlight button looks like this: Read through your document, and every time you encounter backstory–a reference to things that happened prior to the start of the story–highlight it. So here’s how I make use of this function to go hunting for backstory. Thanks to this article by Abigail Hilton, I learned that MS Word CAN in fact find text that is highlighted! But once you’ve done so in a word processor, what else can you do with it? And sure, you can highlight on paper, or you can highlight on screen. Thanks to Margie Lawson and her EDITS system, I appreciate the importance of highlighting. Early backstory slows the pace right as readers are looking to dig into your story, not get bogged down with what already happened. To learn how to enable full keyboard access in a Mac, see Set up your device to work with accessibility in Microsoft 365.I recently went on a hunt for unnecessary backstory in my first 50 pages. ![]() *Move to the previous box, option, control, or command in a dialog *Move to the next box, option, control, or command in a dialog Paste Special (doesn't apply to all products) In this topicĬreate a new file or item (context dependent)Ĭreate a new file from a template or themeĬut the selection (and copy to the clipboard) If you have to press one key immediately after another, the keys are separated by a comma (,). Note: If a shortcut requires pressing two or more keys at the same time, this topic separates the keys with a plus sign (+). ![]()
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