📌 Oh My Word: 8 Microsoft Tips and Tricks for Picture Book Writers (and 1 for Google Docs)
Some you probably know; some you may not!
I am a Microsoft Word girl. Okay, that’s not actually true—I’m a (prepare to be shocked) half Notepad/half Word girl. Blame my early writing habits here—back in the day <hikes up pants, pushes glasses up nose>, I wrote almost all my web content and code in Notepad, and it’s just a habit I have stuck with, especially for fleeting content that I have “platform-based” plans for—book reviews, blog post drafts, and the like.
The REAL stuff, the *private* (at least until I share it at critique) stuff goes in Microsoft Word, and even before the rumors of Google maybe, possibly training its AI on Google Docs content—if not now, maybe in the future—started hitting. Besides my computer-long familiarity with my Microsoft Overlords, though, there are a few particular things I love about Word that help me with writing picture books, which I will list in “frequency with which I use them” order, followed by the One Very Big Thing I use Google Docs for.
Read Aloud
One of the best features of Microsoft Word for picture book writers is having someone *besides* yourself read your manuscript to you. After all, if a disembodied AI voice can perform it pretty well, it can only get better from there.
Bonus tip: did you know the “read aloud’ers” change based on the language you set for proofing? I find the voice they use for Australian English reads like a disappointed Boomer, while the American English reader sounds like a Gen-Z life coach. You can change the language (at least on my version) through Review > Language > Language > Set Proofing Language. IMHO, this feature, though mostly entertaining, could be helpful for rhymers—or those trying to “break into” another English language market!
Micro Word-Counts
One thing I love about Word is that highlighting a portion of your text will give you on-the-spot word counts for that portion. I find this incredibly helpful when I’m paginating and revising.
Comments (for Future Elayne)
This one may seem basic—but I find that leaving comments for myself in my stories is something I use surprisingly often. It helps me make ‘as I see them’ notes for Future Elayne to deal with without losing flow.
Specialty Add-Ins
Once my story is in decent-ish shape, I love to run Grammarly for Word on it to catch punctuation and grammar issues. Even though I often do not want to change the text in the “suggested” ways, it does help to highlight problematic spots—for example, passive voice or using “just” a whole heckuva lot. 😗🎶 Just (see what I’m already doing?) be careful and weigh each choice as critically as a critique partner’s so you don’t lose your voice within your work.
However, there are many other add-ins I *could* use, including those that help you track sources (which I imagine could be very helpful for non-fiction PB writers) and even add-ins that help you translate from one language to another. See the myriad options and how to use (or stop using) them here.
Run Readability Stats
Not surprisingly, a bona fide oldie like me loves that I can run readability and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level stats on whatever I’m working on to spot-check that I’m writing in a kid-friendly way. Luckily, that information is just a few easy clicks away!
To show you how it works, let’s run Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (a particular favorite of mine) through. As the stats show, it’s 899 words long and considered to be at a 5th-grade reading level.
Not “editing” Beatrix Potter—who I love!—but just by way of explaining how I use this for a modern picture book audience, if I got these stats on my picture book manuscript, I’d want to do some reworking. For example, I love using sophisticated vocabulary in my stories--but I try to limit things to one "potentially new word for a PB-age kid" every few sentences, and I’d look at getting the average sentence length down—those two things would likely bring the story within striking distance of a PB. I’d also consider getting that passive sentence percentage down for a modern-day picture book crowd.
Of course, though, as always—use these tools to achieve your goal of telling an excellent story, not to hit specific “stats” only for their own sake. They are overhead lights, not the light at the end of the tunnel.
Find, or Find and Replace
Updating character names, scouting overused words like “just” or “started”—or even searching for “ly” to ditch unnecessary adverbs—Find (and Find and Replace) are classic Word functions for good reason.
As helpful as the function is, I can never find ‘Find and Replace’ on the menu bar! So, I use the PC shortcut Ctrl+H. Also, I always add a space before, and to the end, of what I’m searching and replacing, so that if the word is PART of another word, it’s less likely to jack up anything else unintentionally.
Bonus tip: if you want to specify only upper or lowercase in your search or do anything else a little more specific, look at the options under More, where you can add “match case” parameters and a whole lot more.
Save as .PDF
Many people forget about this option, but Word lets you save documents as Adobe PDFs, which can come in handy when sharing a file you don’t want reformatted or changed fundamentally before being returned to you.
Bonus tip: you can also save in other formats—including web pages, templates, and more—or send files to your Kindle.
Dictation
I barely ever use this for picture books—I type a whole lot faster than I verbalize. Still, the dictation capability is sometimes handy—especially for very rough drafts.
And now…the bonus tip, for Google Docs
As promised, the One Very Big Thing I use Google Docs for: calculating word count minus art notes. (What can I say, I’m an art noter!)
The PB Author Tools extension, created by Nathan Christopher. “But how are you using this without storing your stories on your Google Drive?” you might wonder. Easy. I have one Google Doc I never share, called ‘Word Count Checker,’ a temporary place I cut and paste stuff to run the tool on before deleting it again and leaving the file blank. You can read all about what I love about this free tool here.
There you have it! If you have any tips, I’d love to hear ‘em—drop them in the comments!
Your “Word to your mother” friend,
Elayne
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