Mike Hannay en J. Lachlan Mackenzie - Effective Writing in English

2 Editing

other is not. Chapter 10 of this book offers a great deal of very worthwhile advice on usage, but it needs to be complemented by a manual such as those recommended in Suggestions for further reading. You will of course want to take full advantage of the fact that you are using a computer program. Because your text appears in electronic form and can easily be changed by deleting or moving letters, words, sentences or entire paragraphs, the computer positively invites you to revise your material. Your program has many facilities that are relevant to editing which can be very useful if used prudently. Spellchecker : Set the spellchecker to the form of English you prefer (UK, USA, etc.) and let the program do its work. It will pick out any word in your text that does not correspond with a list of word forms stored in the memo ry. Bear in mind that it will not discover words you have spelled wrongly to look like some other possible word form, e.g. if you misspell too as to or then as than . The spellchecker will also not help you with compound words, for instance: schoolteacher is written as a single word, but the spellchecker will not recognize anything wrong with school-teacher or school teacher . It will also fail to point out that president in President Reagan must be capitalized. Grammar checker : This is a program that conducts a (rather superficial) analysis of the grammar of your sentences. If used with caution, grammar checkers can be very useful, for example in tracking down errors of agree ment between subject and verb (e.g.  The cost of medicines have risen recent ly or  There’s less people using it nowadays ). The program may sometimes warn you that your sentence appears to be a ‘fragment’, which is possibly an indication that it is not grammatically complete. Thesaurus : This useful resource offers you possible synonyms, and some times antonyms, for many words in your texts. Remember, however, that syn onyms do not all have exactly the same meaning and they are very likely to differ in their collocations (the words they go with). So you should always be cautious and consult your monolingual dictionary before inserting a syno nym that you are not fully familiar with. Hyphenation : You have the option of having the computer program break long words at the end of a line and insert a hyphen. The rules for hyphen ation in English are different from Dutch, and there are minor differences between British and American hyphenation, too. So do make sure that you use a hyphenation program for the kind of English you are writing. Footnotes or endnotes : Your program will enable you to insert numbered notes at the foot of the current page (footnotes) or clustered together at the end of your text (endnotes). This facility lightens the task of stating the sources of the information conveyed in your text. For the use and forms of notes in literature and linguistics essays, see Chapter 14 Sections 4, 8 and 9. Translator : Your program may also offer translation. If you cannot think of the right English word for a particular notion, we suggest that you do not

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