Imagine my surprise when I got an email (which I very wrongly assumed was some kind of confirmation that the website had received my article on time and that it was fab) asking me to revise my submission to follow the style guide. Pretty sure I complied while also fruitlessly arguing the superiority of the Chicago Manual of Style (and the double space between sentences). It took me several months (okay … 12 months. It took a year), to finally train my thumbs to only add in a single space at the end of a sentence. And CMOS was right behind me, advocating for a single space between sentences. I think that’s the norm for all style guides now. But before this was easy for me, I had to add this as another step in my editing. So after writing, revising, and self-editing my content and grammar, I would once more go through my article to delete all the extra spaces. Individually. By hand. 

Fast forward a few years and now, not only do I whole-heartedly agree that a sentence needs only one space after the ending punctuation, but my thumbs rarely betray me with an extra tap on the space bar. And, I can almost always recognize JUST BY LOOKING when there are too many spaces in my copy and the copy of others. I say that’s a win all the way around. 

But wait there’s more.

While taking a Track Changes training with the Freelance Editors Club, founding editor, Tara Whitaker, made the most profound statement: you can (and should) use the find and replace function in your word processing program of choice to automatically check for common errors like double spaces between sentences. 

I had been reluctant to use this feature for anything other than double-checking the spelling of names throughout an article. I very daringly used find and replace in my thesis to check that I hyphenated the nineteenth century when used as an adjective. Anything else seemed too risky. But using track changes is really working smarter. Using the find and replace feature of Word or Google Docs to clean up your writing is genius. I now have a long list of words, alternative spellings, grammar styles, and common typos that I search for before I get to work on any editing project. It saves me time by creating a cleaner document in which to work and also gets the project back to the client quicker. I still go space by space through a document but once you run the find and replace for spaces, there’s a lot less to clean up.

I want to encourage each of you to use find and replace for extra spaces, proper quotation marks, accidental capitalization in dialogue scenes, or other common typos that you know you make often. It will save you time and create a cleaner document for editing. Cheers.