Want to get more words on the page?

A not-so-short list of writing and editing tasks just waiting to be optimized (I use all these and more):

• Delete, copy, move, or duplicate paragraphs
• Delete, copy, select, or move sentences or partial sentences
• Quickly select parenthetical text
• Quickly apply common novel or note paragraph or heading styles
• Quickly delete or insert common novel notes or comments
• Select, move, or navigate between headings
• Navigate or select to commas, periods, etc.
• Quick navigation to working locations in your documents

Sorry, I just like this stuff, but I actually have even more.

Microsoft Word does a lot right. It along with it's predecessors allowed us to move away from typewriters, which was a huge improvement in a writer's productivity, but that doesn't mean that Word's interface is perfect. It can still be improved. That's a lot of what this site is about.

Almost all of these actions are triggered by a keyboard shortcut in my workflow since that's the fasted method, but you could also setup and trigger them with a custom ribbon command.

Now, I don't expect everyone to make all of these in a weekend, but I wanted to give you a good flavor of what I use them for.

Of course, I hope you'll find all the free stuff useful and interesting enough to also look at my paid content.

But the free stuff is ... free as well as practical and helpful on its own. In fact, some of the earliest stuff I teach in the newsletter and blog content is the easiest to implement while also being among the most useful just because those editing tasks occur so frequently.

As far as getting paid, everyone has to make a living doing something, so the ox gets to eat some corn if he plows the field. I read something like that somewhere. (Bonus points if you can tell me where it's found! Drop me a note in the contact form if you know.)

Think about your writing and editing process.

What kinds of tasks do you do over, and over … and over? All those seconds you could recover if you had a way to speed them up. Turn them into a single keystroke or maybe two and move on with your work.

For example, it's really not productive to grab the mouse and select a paragraph every time you want to delete one. Why not just have a macro to do it in a blink?

In aggregate, yes. Definitely. Can I say you'll finish your first or second draft in half the time? No, but if you're like me, you'll feel shackled when you have to write in an application where you can't use your macros 'cause they just make it easier and faster.

Of course, some tasks benefit more than others, but often just the reduction in repetitive tedium is nice even when it might not save boat loads of time.

It's also nice to maintain your focus on your writing and word smithing rather than wrestling with the mouse and keyboard just to get necessary, but nevertheless menial, editing tasks done. Why not let the computer do what it's good at doing? So you can focus more on what only you can do.

I get it. Not everyone wants to remember forty-eleven keyboard shortcuts, but you could benefit from one or two, right?

So how much work then? It depends on how many tasks you want to improve, but you can get started with just one or two in a few minutes which is why I'm offering the newsletter ...

You may not get addicted to it like me, but don't be surprised at yourself for wanting a few more here and there when you find yourself repeating another task over and over knowing the computer could do it faster and better.

Plus, I'm here to support and guide you the whole way, so it's worth a try. You might slow down just a tiny bit right at the start, but give it a few attempts, and you'll be editing your manuscript faster for sure.

I relegate some of the more technical or detailed content with more custom code (essentially macro steps) to the paid sections. (For participants who are already programming experts, technical here refers to more programmatic macros that might already intimidate a typical writer trying to improve their editing workflow.) Example topics include:

• Some tasks are a little more complicated than they seem at first glance such as quickly moving sentences with an intuitive behavior or naturally expanding heading selections.
• Navigation perks like jumping to an incomplete or empty paragraph (more useful than it sounds) as you edit.
• Variations in how the macro runs depending on the starting conditions. That way you have one keyboard shortcut that does multiple related tasks depending on the context you set in your document. For example, I use this to insert a standard novel note if there is no selection and another related note if I have text selected.
• Incorporating extra steps to naturally handle dialog quotes or parentheses when manipulating sentences.

And more ... but as I said earlier, the free content includes some of my most used macros, so you should at least get started there along with the newsletter ...

Remember I'll be there to guide you the whole way, making the transition to writing more detailed macros easier, so you can get more work done and focus more on the content not the editing details.