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Using Word bookmarks Microsoft Word bookmarks are a big-time timesaver tool. Wherever you are in a manuscript, you can insert a bookmark and easily come back to it from anyplace in the manuscript. One simple use is when you're editing and it's time to stop, your eyes having become loose in their sockets. The midnight bell tolls and it's time to hang up your brain for the night. Just insert a bookmark (I usually use the word "here."), save the file, and shut down. Here's how: click Insert in your top toolbar; click Bookmark; type in a letter or word, then click the Add button. For some reason, you can't use numbers in bookmarks. Nor more than one word—which leads me to sometimes insert bookmarks such as "describebarn" so I'll know what it's all about. When you next open your doc, type control g (PC) or, for MACs, apple g, select Bookmark in the dialogue box that pops up, select the bookmark you want
(there's a little arrow button to show all bookmarks), click okay and you're there. Bookmarks are useful in other ways, too. For example, you're really struggling with a passage. You can bookmark it and move on, knowing you can
come back to it with ease. When you're stuck for a good word choice, don't founder on lack of immediate inspiration, mark it and move on. More than likely, the perfect word will pop into your mind a half hour later. With your
bookmark in place, you breeze back, take care of it, and return to where you were (because you bookmarked it before you left). Here's another one: I needed to add an element to a character's scenes in several places in the
novel. When I did, I inserted a bookmark (Jake1, Jake2, etc.). Later, I jumped easily from one spot to another to make sure I had kept things consistent and had done all I needed to do to make the new material blend with the old.
Because my first drafts of anything tend to be on the lean side, bookmarking those additional bits of narrative enabled me to visit them after they'd cooled a little to see if they needed more. Because you can give each bookmark
a different, one-word name, another handy use is the ability to check back to earlier passages. This is especially useful for continuity checks. Let's say that early in the novel you created a detailed description of a room, and
the things in that room are important to your story, and come up again. Put a bookmark there ("room" or "roomdescription" or some such) and it's easy to refer back and keep later references accurate. Marking a passage
for later use or change is another bookmark use. In one of my novels, I planned to move a character's description to an earlier chapter during the rewrite. I bookmarked that passage so that, when I got to the new description point
in the rewrite, I could hop there, cut the description from its page, the hop back to where I was (because I inserted a "here" bookmark before I left that point) and paste it in. No hunting, no searching for keyword strings, etc.
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