Proofing 101: The Joys and Perils of Find and Replace
Proofing 101 reviews simple tips for streamlining your pattern writing and editing processes.
I may have extolled the virtues of manually proofing your work in my first post in this series, but I am not a total luddite. On the contrary, I love finding new software shortcuts that make my editing and writing processes faster. One of my favorite tools, as someone who does a lot of annual updating of documents, is find and replace.
Pretty much every word processing software has a Find and Replace function, although you may need to do a little hunting to find where your particular program hides it. (If you’re stuck, you can always search [software program name]+ “find and replace” on the internet). Some of them are quite robust – Microsoft Word and Google Docs, for example, both allow you to match case (this is very useful if you, say, need to find or change all instances of an acronym that also could be a regular word – for example in one of my previous jobs I often needed to locate an acronym spelled ALL and find all the times it was mentioned in a very long document, which would have been extremely tedious if I couldn’t check that match case button and only pull the capitalized ALLs).
One thing many people don’t know about find and replace is you can use it on punctuation marks as well – when the editorial practice at the publications I edited moved from two spaces after a period to one space after a period, the easiest way to check pieces to make sure there weren’t extra spaces was to put two spaces in the “find” box and “replace” it with one space.
For knitwear designers a great use of Find and Replace is to make sure your abbreviations are consistent. If you know you have a habit of sometimes writing k2tg but your preferred abbreviation for your pattern style is K2tog, simply Find and Replace the former with the latter and you don’t have to spend a lot of time scanning your pattern for that particular mistake.
BUT…….
As with any automated tool, there can be some pitfalls.
For example, say you realized you aren’t consistently capitalizing your Ks and Ps, and you think “great I’ll just click the match case button and tell the software to find all lowercase k and replace it with uppercase K.”
But let’s say you have the following sentence in your pattern instructions:
“The Bekka sweater is a kids’ pullover sweater with raglan sleeves and a motif of a kangaroo doing jumping jacks on the front and sleeves.”
If you use that find and replace you now have:
“The BeKKa sweater is a Kids’ pullover sweater with raglan sleeves and a motif of a Kangaroo doing jumping jacKs on the front and sleeves.”
(I made this sweater up for the example, if anyone wants to design it, it sounds adorable!)
So it is important to both think through whether the text you are finding and replacing could accidentally change other text and to do a manual proofreading AFTER you’ve completed all your finding and replacing, just in case something changed that you didn’t intend.
Do you use Find and Replace regularly? If you don’t, can you think of a way it might be useful to you in the future? Let me know in the comments!