TuesdayTips124

Editing Hacks
Navigating With Style(s)

Editing - you either love it, loathe it or just see it as part of the process.
I've looked at the issues surrounding editing before (eg #Tips48 for an outline of the basic process; #Tips72 for help chopping the wordcount), but for these posts, I want to share a few of the tips and tricks I've picked up over the years.
Today's #TuesdayTip looks at how the use of styles can help you navigate your manuscript, and keep track of where you are. I will be focusing on MS Word, but the principles are broadly applicable to other word processing packages. I will be writing another blog post extending this to Scrivener and how you can import it into Word.
First of all, what are styles?
Styles are, in their simplest form, a way to apply pre-determined formatting to a piece of text with a single click of the mouse. Imagine you have a piece of text. Word applies a default set of formats to it when you open a blank document. You can then choose a different font, the font size, and modifications such as whether or not the text is BOLD, Underlined, italicised, or a different colour. Delve a little deeper into the paragraph settings and you can decide how the text is aligned, spaced, or add bullet points etc.
This is all well and good, but it may take you several clicks to get the text just the way you want it. And it can be time-consuming if you have to do that each time you start a new document. And what if you have several different types of text within a single document, for example a title, or you prefer to format quoted text differently from the main text?
This is where styles come in useful. Word has a series of different styles built-in, that you can select from the style gallery. All you need to do is select the text you want, and apply a style by clicking on it in the style gallery.

So how does a style help you navigate a manuscript?
Well styles have a hierarchy and this affects whether they appear in the left hand Navigation Pane. You can think of this as rather like a bookmark that can help you navigate the document by jumping to a section.
In the image below, you can see that I have written two chunks of text, with two titles separating them. The Navigation Pane is currently empty, with just some text from MS explaining what the pane is for.

In the next image, I have highlighted the two titles and applied the style Heading 1. Not only do they now look different, they are also listed in the Navigation Pane. If I want to jump around my document, I can easily do so by clicking the link in the navigation pane.

This is a great way to insert chapter breaks. You can easily jump from chapter to chapter by clicking on the relevant chapter in the Navigation Pane.
But this only scratches the surface of what styles can do.
I use them to navigate between scenes. When I start to write a new scene, I like to put a title with a couple of lines of descriptive text. This reminds me what happens in that scene. By applying a style to that text, I can navigate my document by going directly to that scene; useful if I have no idea which chapter something actually occurs in.
Top Tip: Choose a different style than the one that you applied to your chapter heading.

You can see in this next image that not only does my descriptive text appear different in the document to both the chapter and the main text, it is also indented slightly on the Navigation Pane.

Finishing up.
Now obviously, at some point you are going to want to share this document with beta readers, and eventually publish. The last thing you want is to leave those spoilers in.

First of all, removing that descriptive text is easy. If you right click the style in the gallery, you will get a simple context menu. If you choose "Select All", then it will highlight all instances of that style in one go. Hit delete and it is gone.
(Another advantage of "Select All" is that it does a word count for the selected text. So if you are over your word count, you can see how many of those extra words are descriptive text that you will be deleting before publishing.)

But don't jump the gun and delete these useful navigation tools too soon. You may want to use them when doing later edits. Furthermore, deleting them changes the pagination. For example. when I send the manuscript to my beta readers or other editors, they often give me feedback in the form of "There is a typo on the third line of page 26." However, if you have deleted the descriptive text, then the page numbers for the text may have shifted.
So instead, before sending to my beta readers or editors, I leave the descriptive text in place and redact it so the spacing stays the same, but spoilers are hidden and I can still navigate the document.
To do this, simply right click the style again and choose "Modify".
Now you can change the formatting of the style.
I turn the font to black (not automatic) and from the borders option select black for the fill option. It's not pretty, but it hides the spoilers and I can easily reverse it if I choose to do so.

This is just a basic outline of how to use styles. Over the years, I've tweaked my method so it fulfils my own particular needs. I also use my own custom style rather than one of the built-in styles.
I hope this was useful. Do you have any useful tips like this?
If so, please feel free to comment here or on social media. If you are a writer with your own tip to share, then please don't be shy about emailing me on dcijones@outlook.com, I'm always looking for guest bloggers.
Until next time,
Paul