Hey guys, Ideally what I'd love to see is a specialized thesaurus tool that is a thesaurus for fiction writers. Or even better would be a way to search some book contents for a particular phrase or word. Fantasy thinking. So how about an automatic drop-down in Word? Rather than researching the word, but you get an option to see the other possibilities. Is this possible?
word has a built-in thesaurus... all you have to do is put your cursor over the word and right click your mouse... then click on 'synonyms' and a list appears...
Thanks, but I'm looking for something a bit more cohesive. The Word thesaurus pulls you from your writing and then you pick the word you think is best. I'm hoping to find something that works directly within the Word document. Let's say I have He rushed to the corner, but she was gone. And I want to change the word rushed. I want to see some options for rushed. I don't know what it is about that word but I don't like it. So I would love to see a drop down or even a special right click menu. That way I can click the word choice I want. Let's say I want hastened. He hastened to the corner, but she was gone.
yes, that's what i was referring to... and i don't see how it can be said to 'take you out of your work'... thanks for the screen shot, jb!
And you can search in your own work the same was as searching documents online. Hit ctrl+f and a search field pops up. You can also use it to replace every mistake you made. If you discover that "irregardless"is not a word, you can click [replace all] and change every instance. Especially good during editing. You can read a proof copy and find the mistakes you unearthed, quickly. Also great when you change a character's name. I changed "Ann" to "Teresa" and discovered a minor drawback. Every word with those letters in it got changed. :-( Announced became Teresaounced. Planned became plTeresaed. Arrgh!
Thanks guys, yeah that makes sense. @JetBlackGT yeah I do use Words find and replace option. When I'm looking for possible weak words I'll usually use spaces or full stops to denote where they are. So if I'm looking for 'was' searching for that will find washed, wasp, etc. By adding a space before and after it only finds ' was '. Same for today when I noticed a sentence beginning with 'Yet'. The full stop helped me find the three instances.
