Observations on the world and its inhabitants
Despite explicit instructions, generative AI systems routinely drift into US English spelling and conventions across longer writing projects. For British-English authors who use AI assistance, this creates a persistent and time-consuming editorial burden. The key insight that resolved this was accepting that generation and linguistic compliance should be treated as separate stages. Rather than attempting ...
1. The Problem: “All or Nothing” Microsoft Word’s built-in word count feature is binary: it counts everything or nothing. For an author, this is often insufficient. A 50,000-word manuscript might be heavily dialogue-driven or dense with internal monologue, but Word treats “Hello” (dialogue) exactly the same as Hello (thought). There will be times when an ...
Not everybody needs this! I often have text copied from PDF when I’m working on something. This leads to loads of unnecessary paragraph marks. At other times I have rows of plain text copied from somewhere. It’s a pain to get rid of paragraph marks at the end of each line, yet preserving the correct ...
All of this post is my notes. It is not designed for ‘you’. I use advanced features of find and replace in MS Word. I write my notes like self-talk because I’ve noticed that in a few months’ time I may not remember every aspect of this. Challenge Recently I wanted to find an easy ...
Loads of people don’t know much about how to use a ‘word processor’. Hmmm.. the words ‘word processor‘ now seem so strange. Formatting documents is a most important activity. Why? A well presented letter or report starts off at an advantage of being well received and easier to read. The reader is put in the ...
Over the years I’ve seen how people use word-processors. In fact the term has almost gone completely out of vogue. Most people in work environments use Microsoft Word. In the pandemic period documents would regularly have been shared in a group on a big screen and somebody would be typing. That experience over the last ...
