Hi, hope someone can help me. I'm not sure if this is even possible. I have MS Word 2007 and I'm looking to edit a fiction book and need to search for various different words and phrases to improve the book's prose, however I dont want to search for these words and phrases in the characters' dialogue. Is this possible? bearing in mind I am English and all the character dialogue is contained/enclosed within single speech marks rather than double marks as are typically used in the U.S. (not that this should make much difference for the search).

Furthermore, if this can be done, would it also be possible to also exclude all italic words from the search as this will exclude searching the characters' thoughts which I want to bypass as well?

Hope someone can help as this could save me a massive amount of time, although I fear it may require a macro of some type to achieve.
Yours sincerely
Rob

Assuming your dialogue uses smart quotes, you could exclude text in dialogues by coding a wildcard Find/Replace like:
Find = (^0148[!^0147]@)text to find
Replace = \1replacement text

It is also possible, to exclude italics, by setting the font parameters for the Find.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Hi Paul, thanks for the help it's much appreciated. I tried your suggestion and subbed in the single curly speech marks and it worked to an extent, but there are problems with dialogue which contain words with apostrophes in. for instance, I searched for the word 'very' using the following formula with wildcards selected: (^0146[!^0145]@) very

And the find function highlighted the text I've marked in red below which is inside the dialogue. Obviously the extra speech mark used as an apostrophe causes the issue and now I wish I was American and used the double speech marks as this would bypass the issue. However, as I need to stay with UK standards changing the speech marks is not an option, so with this in mind can you see a way round this problem?

‘If that’s your argument,’ Walker said, ‘it’s not very convincing.’

Looking at it I would imagine it needs some kind of IF command, i.e. IF the apostophe ^0146 is followed by anything except white space then ignore, which would also bypass other words like they're, won't etc. Although knowing what I need to do and putting into practise are two VERY different things.

The problem with using single quotes as you have done is that it is impossible to distinguish their use as apostrophes or scare-quotes from speech. Even crafting a F/R expression to exclude word ending in 's (not that I believe such would be possible) wouldn't help with words ending in s'.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Assuming your document doesn't use local formatting or character styles, I would try to separate this task into two parts
1. Tag all dialog with a character style (it doesn't need any attributes so this could be formatting-neutral)
2. Search for your term with default paragraph font style

In your example, you could separate the apostrophes from a dialogue close quote by the punctuation that precedes it. If that punctuation is consistent in your document that should work.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Thanks Paul, yeh sadly UK formatting convention on books using single speech marks is my downfall. Looks like I'll have to do it the hard way, although the formula you gave me is still useful, it'll just take a little bit longer than I envisaged, but I'm sure it will still save me time so thanks again for your help, as I said before its much appreciated.

Hi Andrew, thanks for the advice as well, although I fear allocating all dialogue with a style would almost be as much work as what I'm already doing as the book is 1300 pages long, we'll its actually become two books, but the length is the same, either way it wouldn't be quick. Although I didn't really understand what you meant when you said I could separate the apostrophes from a dialogue close quote by the punctuation that precedes it, I take you meant if I had charcter styles for dialogue I could do this?

I meant that a closing quote that is preceded by a full stop or a comma can be assumed to be the close of an actors speech whereas one preceded by a letter a-z would be an apostrophe. This pattern would allow you to modify a wildcard string to more accurately identify speech.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Taking that approach, you might try a wildcard Find/Replace with:
Find = (^0145[!^0145]@)text to find([!^0146.,\?\!]@[.,\?\!][^0146])
Replace = \1replacement text\2

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Ah right, I see what you mean, Andrew, good thinking. And Paul, thanks for the formula too, although I tried it and it seems to do the opposite to what I need, hence it picks up the word inside the dialogue only, which might be useful in itself to me at some point and it's obviously solved the issue of separating dialogue from prose but the wrong way round. Is there anyway to invert the formula's product do you think? Looking at it makes my head hurt.

If you define a Style for your dialogues (probably a character Style), you could use a wildcard Find/Replace with:
Find = ^0145[!^0145]@[.,\?\!][^0146]
Replace = ^&
and specify your dialogue Style as the replacement Style.

Having done that, you could use an ordinary Find/Replace to look for your content in whatever other Style the rest of your document uses for the body text.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Aha, eureka! It works, that's fantastic guys, thanks so much for your help this will serve me well and will save me a lot of work and a lot of screen staring too. Thanks again, you're a couple of stars!


p.s. if you ever need some writing advice/help just drop me a message, not sure if I will be able to help but I'd give it my full attention.


Cheers fellas!
Rob