Your anguished cry rings out in the middle of the night: “Why, oh why, did I accept this stupid freelance job?” You know the answer: The client offered you twice as much money as you’d ordinarily get for a job like this because the deadline is tight. But now that deadline is looming, and there’s still a lot of work ahead. If only you knew how to use wildcard find and replace!

[First of all, if you're working under a deadline, I recommend adding PerfectIt to MS Word to check for brackets and quotes left open (and much more), quickly.] Now, onto the topic at hand: How to find a parenthesis symbol ( in a wildcard search in Word.

At last! You have your idea, you have your outline, you have the time, and you have your blank screen in front of you. Nothing can stop you from writing now! Nothing? Well, except the phone, emails, social media, self-doubt, and even the software you’re using… Writing is hard. It requires focus and momentum. Even if you think you can deal with the distractions, it doesn’t take much to send your train of thought off the rails.

The new version of PerfectIt is a bigger deal than that “.1” suggests. As with any new software version, it has lots of small fixes and improvements. However, it has one huge new capability. For the first time, you can control exactly what PerfectIt checks. Now you can turn PerfectIt into a custom checker designed (by you) to lift writing standards at your organization.

If you build your preferences into PerfectIt, then it can help raise writing standards at your organization. If there’s text that you don’t have time to check, you can use PerfectIt to help your colleagues avoid errors. Even on documents that you will check, PerfectIt can help your colleagues identify errors earlier and improve their own writing.

In PerfectIt 4.1, we’ve introduced the Checks to Include tab in the Style Sheet Editor. It lets you set preferences for PerfectIt styles. Now you can control whether a PerfectIt check is included, and what part of a PerfectIt check is included.

The new version of PerfectIt has much more than that “.1” suggests! For the first time, you can control exactly what PerfectIt finds. Now you can turn PerfectIt into a custom checker designed (by you) to lift writing standards at your organization.

It’s easy to press the italics button in Microsoft Word, but have you ever wondered if you’re using italics correctly? One of the common uses of italic type is for words and phrases that are in a foreign language. You might have noticed that documents in English use italics if, for example, any French, German or Latin words appear.

The advantage of lists is that they jump out at readers. However, if lists contain typos or inconsistencies then those will jump out at readers too. So it’s crucial to format and punctuate lists correctly, or your entire document can look sloppy.

You’re more important to your company than you know. You’re also more important to your company than the rest of your company knows. Which is a bit of a problem. And a big part of it is how you—and others—see your role in the company.

We used PerfectIt, Intelligent Editing's add-in for MS Word that finds inconsistencies, to check 1200 randomly selected documents. Each document was 1500 words or more and was downloaded from the internet. The results were staggering. Everyone knows not to use two different spellings for the same word, but we found that more than a quarter of documents published online did exactly that. The worst offender was 'organise' and 'organize', which came up in more than 10% of all documents (including all the sub-variations, such as 'organization' and 'organizes'). But it was far from the only one. Here's the full top 10.

The first line of defense against consistency errors is simply being aware of them. The Top 10 errors listed below give authors and editors a reminder of important things to check before documents are published. However, the best way to improve consistency in documents is to run PerfectIt.

As a medical writer, your team depends on you to catch errors, large and small. It’s your job to make sure that months or even years of hard work on a regulatory submission, grant application, or research article aren’t undermined by small imperfections that make a bad impression and weaken your team’s credibility.

You want your self-published book to make an impression on your readers. But you want that impression to be based on your ideas and your writing, not on inconsequential errors and inconsistencies in spelling and punctuation.

If you’ve been using PerfectIt 3, then you’re about to experience a dramatic improvement in how PerfectIt works and how much time it can save. The improvements bring Windows users in line with features that Mac users have had since the launch of PerfectIt Cloud.

If your work involves more than one style manual, or more than one set of style preferences, you’re going to love the changes in PerfectIt 4 (our Windows edition). The most exciting difference is the introduction of styles based on styles. However, it helps to understand the other changes we’ve made.

People resent being corrected. No matter how big or small the problem is, no one likes to feel scolded. You may be the office editorial expert, but your co-workers won’t welcome unsolicited instruction on how to use software they’ve been using for years; and they certainly don’t want to hear that words they’ve used their whole lives are offensive to company stakeholders.

Most abbreviations do require a definition. In any case where readers might be confused by TLAs (three letter abbreviations), it's important that they be defined in the text or in a Table of Abbreviations. A research proposal or article with complicated and confusing abbreviations is one that will quickly face rejection. The problem is that authors become so familiar with abbreviations that they forget to define them. To test how prevalent the problem is, we used PerfectIt, the add-in for MS Word that locates undefined abbreviations, to check 3000 randomly selected documents.

The best way to self-edit a document is not to. Seriously: You should get an editor’s help whenever you can. The cost is probably less than you think. The work will come back faster than you think. And you are better off if you don’t try to go it alone. You can find more details in You Should Hire an Editor.

What should you do if you’re the lone voice of editorial standards in a company full of people who can’t even be bothered to put their dishes in the dishwasher or make sure their garbage hits the wastebasket, let alone follow your style guide?