Language operatives

We use MS Word to construct manuscripts.

The following Teams Classes cover this core area.

Publishing Solutions: A checklist for formatting a manuscript

“Building Perfect Book Blocks in Microsoft Word” is a checklist that is one of the tools that we developed to address formatting a manuscript. It involves working with special characters, proofing language, document cleanup and quality check.

Eventually you arrive at the galley proof or page proof (the final proof) of your book. But how do you get there with a document that has been constantly evolving? Content has been added and removed; it has been formatted and reformatted. However, you now need to build those perfect book blocks.

You can do so via this detailed process involving your paying careful attention to special characters, such as non-breaking spaces, optional hyphens and the like, that impact end-of-line hyphenation. Using MS Word, you will be able to produce a typographically vetted document that is free of widows, orphans, runs, stacks and other formatting inconsistencies.

The Literary Editing Project (LEP): A process-method for literary manuscripts

The LEP is an editing process that uses the concepts of grammatical “form” and “function” to study and describe morphology, syntax, and orthography. The LEP helps you ensure your edit will result in the construction of a highly readable (close reading) and grammatically sound (effective writing) literary manuscript. The LEP also helps you elevate your literary writing through greater awareness of grammatical functions and syntactic functions and the use of the Find tool (search dialog) in MS Word.

The LEP is concerned with the most integral language operatives involved in constructing a manuscript.

MCINTOSHFORMS™: A grammatical editing method

MCINTOSHFORMS™ is a process-method we developed as part of our editing model to meaningfully isolate grammatical forms (via Reading Highlight, which quickly finds highlighted text) using the Advanced Find tool in MS Word. This process-method enables us to search for specific patterns that we will study/review, and to address any usage issues identified instead of relying on generative AI to instantly resolve textual problems. This involves the use of regular expressions, a “group of characters or symbols which is used to find a specific pattern from some text.”