Feather Touch Editing

Microsoft Word bristles with useful keyboard shortcuts. Many are well known, but some obscure shortcuts deserve to be rescued from oblivion. One of these (CTRL-SHIFT-G) displays word statistics for a text selection. Select the text whose words you want to count, and hit CTRL-SHIFT-G. A small window pops up with text statistics for the selection. I use the word count, but also shown are the character count, line count, etc. In my example (see the above image), I selected the m

The typo is the bane of the copyeditor. However careful I am, I'll invariably find a handful during my final read. It could be an extra letter in a word, a deleted letter in a word, a deleted word, etc. The most insidious typo is what is called the atomic typo: a small change in a word that sabotages the intended meaning. Examples are "from" instead of "form," "manger" instead of "manager," "angel" instead of "angle," and so on. My very first freelance copyediting assignment