Regular expressions provide a language for searching and editing strings of characters. They can be invaluable for academic editing.

In MS Word, simple regular expressions are called “wildcards.” Used with care, these can save an editor time and keyboard strokes. You can enable them by Cntrl-F to bring up the Find/Replace dialogue box, clicking “More >>” and checking the “Use wildcards” box.

Now, in the Find box, enter:

(<[a-z]{1,9}>) <\1>

This string searches your document for repeated words of up to 9 characters. If there are no repeated words in your document, then it returns Search Item Not Found. Repeat a word in your document and click Find: the double word is now (or should be) highlighted.

Of course, it also finds deliberately repeated words. Let this serve as a reminder that letting wildcards loose on a document without human oversight can be a terrible mistake. We can use wildcards to speed our editing work, but I would never recommend using them in combination with the “Find/Replace All” operation.

Wildcard expressions I have developed for common academic editing tasks, expecially editing reference lists, are given here. Please tell me if you do, or do not, find them useful.

Final warning: MS Word Track Changes can generate bugs when used in combination with wildcards (as discussed here); I find it’s best to turn track changes off while working with wildcards.

There is a helpful tutorial on the use of MS Word regular expressions here.

Extensive background information on regular expressions can be found here.