Make your Word Processor work harder

Most writers use a word processor to type up or write directly. Here are some tips to work smarter not harder. This guide will attempt to help you spend more time writing and less time formatting.

Use block styles

Generally, word processors start off in a default style. With Libre Office (and Open Office) this is literally called default style. The default style is about as useless as it gets.

Default forces you to manually add indents, line spacing, and formatting. Want to change one of those – go through the whole manuscript and make those changes.

Or do the same with a few clicks.

What you are seeing here is the text style selector. You can see I have presets for Text Body and headings and a seperate one for quotations.

What this allows me to do is tell my word processor what the text is for. If it is body text, it should be a size 12 font with 120% line spacing. If it is a heading it should be big and bold. Etc..

Now that the Word Processor knows what the text is, you can quickly restyle the entire document.

This screenshot is from Libre Office but similar options exist with almost every modern word processor.

Later, you can customise indents, line spacing, font, alignment and everything else. This will instantly update the look of all your “Text Body” paragraphs. Similarly you can format headings, quotes, and so forth to meet an individual publishers requirements. You can even define your own custom styles.

Full stops, commas, and the like.

There is some debate over spaces after full stops (periods to you Americans). Old style typing standard was two spaces but with a word processor you can get away with just one space and use your style settings to let the word processor take car of spacing issues for you.

Other than that, a space after full stops and commas (and semicolons, colons, quote marks, and dashes) but no space before full any of them (except dashes that need a space both sides).

Commas are used for lists. However, there is no agreement if there should be a comma before the last “and” or “or” in the list. This “optional” comma is known as the oxford comma. While it can generally add additional clarity it is best to check the style of the publisher or publication you are writing for.

Example: Punctuation, full stops, and an Oxford comma.

Spaces between paragraphs and indents

In case you have not got the gist of this article yet – do not add manual line breaks or tab indents. Let your style format do that for you. All you should need to be concerned with is the actual words you write. Your word processor can handle all the rest.

Should an editor want double line breaks between paragraphs just double the number in the space after paragraph box.

If a publication wants one inch indents (after doing an inches to millimetres conversion via Google and getting 25.4), set the first line indent.

Avoid bold and italics

It is all well and good to use italics spearingly for stress but what happens if your publisher wants stresses to be bold, or blue, or underlined?

This is where inline styles come into play. Just like your paragraph styles you can define (or may already have defined) inline style settings. This effect only selected text.

Just like with the paragraph and heading styles (block styles), define (or use) a stress or emphasis style. Then you can change the italics to bold, make it green, and underline it. All without going through your document to make the changes.

For one story I wrote, I defined styles called “email”, “chats”, and “thoughts” as a lot of the conversations were digital. This allowed me to try different fonts and formats for each style until I found one that I liked. Should an editor want things done differently, a few clicks is all it will take to change 100,000+ words of styled content.

Table of contents

Most modern word processors can generate a table of contents (an index of chapters) based on your heading styles. This means you can give a chapter guide which updates as you work on the document.

I use auto generated table of contents as an index if I plan to release a PDF of my writing. It makes it easier on you reader and does all the fiddly page counting for you. Leaving you more time to just write the content.

Use your footers

When sharing work, it can be handy to have the title, page number, and your author name at the bottom of each page. You can edit the footer to make this happen. You should also have fields you can insert such as page number and number of pages, the date, date of last edit, and others.

The footer will repeat at the bottom of every page. Your fields such as page number will change but everything else will be the same. This allows you to keep your printed pages in order.

Over to you

What word processing tips do you use to make your writing easier? Use the comments to let me know your thoughts, fancy hacks, and tricks of the trade.