I have a list of 50 weasel words that I would like to highlight in my novel so I can exorcise them. When I try the search and replace option, I don’t see any way to automatically highlight a word. Optimally, I’d like to be able to go one step further, and highlight all 50 words automatically.
If you use project search, it will call up all the documents with your search word and will highlight the words for you so you can go through and remove them–Cmd-G will jump you to next instance in the document, and if you load the entire search results as a Scrivenings session you can go through all of them at once. You can refine the search as you want–probably limit the scope to “text”, since I doubt you need to clean up your synopses or document notes, and you might want to limit it also just to documents in the Draft folder. You can search for multiple words at once if you choose the “Any” operator, but be careful with that one since if you have short words that make up part of larger words, you’ll get some false positives. (E.g. if you search for “the” you’ll also find “they”.) “Whole word” is safest, but you’d have to do each word individually. Depending on your words, you can probably do some mixed together in “any” and then run the rest as “whole word.”
After you’ve done the project search, you can also call up the regular find/replace if you want to use the replace tool (though of course it will only work for one word at a time); the highlights will remain so long as you’re viewing the project search results.
Thanks. That helps some, but it doesn’t quite do what I want it to do. If I’ve got a sentence, “Soon they’d be panting and too tired to run.” I want to be able to highlight “soon”, “ing” (panting) and “too” so that I can rethink the whole sentence at once.
They’ll all be highlighted if you search for “soon ing too” and use the “any word” operator.
Ah ha! That did it! And so much easier than writing a Word macro!
Thanks!