How to find accidental repeated words

[withoutFeathers]

Hi,
Is there a macro or other way to find accidental repeated words?

I find after heavy editing sometimes I fail to notice small repeated words like 'to to' or 'the the', even on copy-edit.

Spell check doesn't flag them.

I looked through the macros and the manual and can't find anything that appears to do the job.

?

wF

[martin]

There is a way to find accidentally duplicated words using PowerFind (aka: regular expressions). In this case you'd want to use an expression like:

dupes.png (17.08 KiB) Viewed 11524 times

You can insert those PowerFind "bubbles" using the little gear icon menu next to the "Find what" field.

If you want to learn more about this particular PowerFind expression, you might see this related post in another thread. That post, and the following discussion, goes into some of the PowerFind features employed here.

[martin]

Oh, and some more tips:
1. You can save a PowerFind expression you've created using that same gear icon menu, and then later reload it.
2. You can also turn any Find/Replace expressions you've created into a macro using that gear icon menu. I'll attach such a macro for this duplicate word search here.

[withoutFeathers]

I'll attach such a macro for this duplicate word search here.

Great Martin, thanks, works nicely. Using this, with a keyboard command assigned to it, I found five accidentally repeated words in a 200,000 word manuscript in under two minutes!



wF

[withoutFeathers]

I'll attach such a macro for this duplicate word search here.

Great Martin, thanks, works nicely. Using this, with a keyboard command assigned to it, I found five accidentally repeated words in a 200,000 word manuscript in under two minutes!



wF

P.S. Considering how often I see this nowadays in professionally published books ('and and' or 'the the' being the likeliest offenders), I'd suggest you include this macro as part of the shipping package of Nisus, and draw attention to it in the manual. Either that, or put an option into the Spellchecker to flag doubled words (with a checkbox). However I think the macro is a better option, because I did find many legitimate words doubled, and it wouldn't be good to have those underlined in red all the time.

[martin]

Excellent, I'm glad this macro did the trick!

I'd suggest you include this macro as part of the shipping package of Nisus, and draw attention to it in the manual. Either that, or put an option into the Spellchecker to flag doubled words (with a checkbox). However I think the macro is a better option, because I did find many legitimate words doubled, and it wouldn't be good to have those underlined in red all the time.

I think that's a good suggestion (on both counts). I'll see about getting this macro added to the default set, and I'll up-vote the enhancement request to add this feature to the spellchecking process.

[greenmorpher]

This macro flags repeates for individual correction, I hope?

Cheers, geoff

[martin]

This macro flags repeates for individual correction, I hope?

You could have it do that as well. I'm attaching a macro here that scans the whole document and asks the user about each duplicate it finds, offering to fix it or move to the next one.

[greenmorpher]

Many thanks, Martin. I've loaded it and am ready to go! I was thinking mainly of some instances of "that that" -- a rather clumsy but sometimes useful construction. Actually, I was thinking there must be others, but then the more I thought about it, the more I came to think "that that" was the only one!

Cheers, geoff

[Patrick J]

Many thanks, Martin. I've loaded it and am ready to go! I was thinking mainly of some instances of "that that" -- a rather clumsy but sometimes useful construction. Actually, I was thinking there must be others, but then the more I thought about it, the more I came to think "that that" was the only one!

Cheers, geoff

Repeating words is such a no no

[greenmorpher]

Excellent, patrick!

Cheers, geoff