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Finale Edit Cover
50 Time-Saving Editing Techniques Every Writer Needs to Know Now
Language Arts: Editing & Proofreading
Softcover: 210 pages; Dimensions: 6x9
ISBN: 978-1-937449-00-1 and imprint of
Science of Writing
Final Edit Quick Reference now available (
sample); More info at ScienceOfWriting.com
Author: Chris Yavelow
What if you could finish your final edit in hours instead of weeks? What if you could automate most of the process? What if you could do it yourself instead of hiring an expensive editor?

You can do all this and more with a little-known feature in Word called “wildcard” searches. The 50 searches detailed in this book will scavenge your draft for thousands of errors and sometimes even fix the errors automatically. Equipped with the results from twelve years of data-mining bestsellers, the author is able to provide hard and fast rules pertaining to edit decisions that otherwise might force you to stop in your tracks while the clock is ticking.

The Science of Writing book series, and imprint of YAV Publications, reveals writing strategies of bestselling professional authors, and teaches you how to build upon those skills in your own writing. The first book in the series is Final Edit, The Final Hours of Your Final Draft. Although the subject of this first book is self-editing, many of the editing decisions derive from proven scientific data obtained through computational linguistics research. This is intentional. The series will gradually introduce you to an approach to writing that is focused on shaping your content into the form that will best communicate to your readers. Each succeeding book in the series will disclose more of the results of twelve years of research into bestsellers, both fiction and nonfiction, using proprietary software—an expert system that has undergone six years of development beyond the version that we released at FictionFixer.com.
CHRIS YAVELOW has worked in every aspect of the book business and has more than a dozen books to his credit. After his Music and Sound Bible received the Computer Press Association’s “Best Advanced How-To Book” award, he spent 5 years as series editor for A-R Editions’ Digital Audio Series. Since 2000, he has been developing an unprecedented software tool for authors: FictionFixer.com. In 2007, he launched YAV Publications, an author-friendly, digital publishing company with extremely high standards. He teaches online for the University of Maryland University College where he is a Full Professor. His courses are "Music as Cultural Expression" and "Digital Media." The latter, for graphic design majors, includes Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and web tools leading to the design of both a print catalog and a web-based portfolio. He and his wife are longtime avid hikers with a focus on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, which they hiked for the first time in 2012.
Click the "Read Excerpt" button to open a PDF containing the book's first 2 or 3 chapters. Whether this window will display the PDF in place, or open a new window or tab, or download the file for you to open with another application (sometimes automatically opening an application to display the PDF), or simply open an empty window is entirely up to the way you have configured your PDF settings for your device.
This standard-format Quick Reference is designed to accompany the book Final Edit, The Final Hours of Your Final Draft, but may also be of some value to those who do not on the book, provided he or she is already familiar with Word's "wildcard" searches.

The Quick Ref includes 6 important tables, 46 searches (of the 80 total), and 9 of the 13 word lists. All the essentials!

ISBN: 978-1-937449-06-3

The Final Edit Quick Reference is discounted when purchased at the same time as the accompanying book, Final Edit, The Final Hours of Your Final Draft. Press the "Bundle" button above to purchase both together, or visit
ScienceOfWriting.com for additional info.

Writers Groups interested in quantity discounts should email
Books@yav.com for to obtain a Writers Group Discount Code.
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