Yesterday, while blog hoping, I came across author Roger J Carlson’s website.  I found him while browsing Preditors and Editors for software.  P and E lists him as a recommended site.  The link leads you to his Tech Tips page.  There, you’ll find several Microsoft Word Macros.  Each is outlined below.  Each is designed to help improve your written work. Each is, of course, free. 

These little macros won’t replace an honest-to-goodness, living, breathing, editor.  But, what they will do is make your personal revisions a bit easier and illuminate negative aspects of your work you didn’t realize were there.  So, when you DO engage an editor, his or her time isn’t needlessly burned with basics…and maybe you’re not as embarrassed.

Rather than re-write Roger’s web site information for each macro, I’ve cut and pasted directly from the Tech Tips page.  See what you think…

Utilities for Writers (MS Word)

Passive Word Highlighter (version 3)
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program to highlight passive, misused, or over-used words in a document. (updated to allow font styles for non-color printers)

Preposition Highlighter
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program to highlight excessive prepositions in both sentences and paragraphs.  It allows the user to select the threshold for and color of prepositions.

Adverb Highlighter (version 2)
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program to highlight every "ly" word in your document.  Since most adverbs end in "ly", it catches most of them.  There is also an exception list for those word which end in "ly" and are not adverbs. (updated to allow strike-through font style for non-color printers)

Adverb Eliminator
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program which is similar to the Adverb Highlighter, but goes one step further and uses the Track Changes feature of MS Word to mark all these words for deletion.

Word Frequency Counter
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program to count the frequency of word usage in a document. It works with Word documents, Text documents, and Rich Text documents.

Phrase Frequency Counter
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program to count the frequency of phrases in a document. It works with Word documents, Text documents, and Rich Text documents.

Count Lines
This Zipped up MS Word document contains a program to accurately count the number of lines in a document. It works with Word documents, Text documents, and Rich Text documents.

So, you can see he’s created several useful little programs.  He even has a link that tells you how to make macros for areas that aren’t addressed above. 

To test the site, and the macros, I downloaded and tried the Adverb Eliminator—not that I use adverbs–excessively (ops).  First, I ran my Norton AntiVirus/spyware software on the file before unzip.  Yes, he’s P and E recommended, but, it doesn’t hurt to be cautious.  The download came up clean—as I suspected it would. 

Then, I unzipped it as a word document.  Save it on your desktop for easy retrieval.  Open the document.  Inside you’ll find an explanation about what the program does and a box to enter the word or RTF file you want to check.  Enter the file name, either with a browse, or directly.  Click the button to retrieve the file and run the macro.

It worked exactly as advertised and did so painlessly.  If you have a large file, give it a second to analyze the document.  The MS Word accept/reject comments feature works like a charm.  You’ll pay serious money for commercial software that does some of these same things, but doesn’t do them as well.

One note.  These macros are designed to be run inside MS Word, so, if you’re using something else these macros probably won’t work for you.  Additionally, the macros were written well before Word 2007, so, it won’t recognize .Docx extensions.  However, it will run on .doc and .rtf files.  I saved my 2007 .docx file as an RTF and it worked fine.  I suspect the same is true of the other utilities.

Before you leave Rodger’s site, be sure to visit his Licensure page.  Enter your name and gender.  The page returns a Poetic, literary, or Artistic license that permits you—by name–to break any and all rules of that genre—signed by Rodger.  Pretty funny.  Hope you find something useful.  Thanks for stopping by.  Galen.