The PerfectIt Blog

Here you will find tips and tricks for more efficient editing techniques and improved content. Explore a wealth of ideas, practical advice, and industry best practices that will help you save time while improving the quality of your written documents.

Business of Editing Zygmunt Andrew Spray Business of Editing Zygmunt Andrew Spray

Using Wildcards to Change Chicago-Style Number Ranges to Regular-Style Number Ranges

Are you getting the most you can from Microsoft Word? Wildcard search is one of the most powerful features in Word. You can use it to quickly find errors and make changes throughout a document in a matter of seconds. In this article, learn how to use Word wildcards to change Chicago-style number ranges to regular-style number rangers.

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Technical Writing, Business of Editing PerfectIt Technical Writing, Business of Editing PerfectIt

The 2020 Guide to Using Word Wildcards

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!

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

Don’t Stop Writing!

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.

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Product News, Styles, Business of Editing PerfectIt Product News, Styles, Business of Editing PerfectIt

PerfectIt 4.1: Editors Into Educators

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.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

What Can You Teach with PerfectIt?

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.

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Business of Editing Zygmunt Andrew Spray Business of Editing Zygmunt Andrew Spray

How to Decide If You Should Italicize Foreign Words and Phrases

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.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

The Top 10 Inconsistent Spellings

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.

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Business of Editing PerfectIt Business of Editing PerfectIt

The Top 10 Consistency Mistakes

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.

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Medical Writing, Business of Editing PerfectIt Medical Writing, Business of Editing PerfectIt

Six Tips to Speed Up How You Edit Medical Documents

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.

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Medical Writing

Editing

Proposal Writing