Editing Word files for publication

5.1. Setting the title and author

Just putting the title and author in big bold type at the top of the document won't achieve anything unless they are styled with meaningful names as (eg) ‘Title’ and ‘Author’. But even better is to put the title and author (and other metadata) in the right place: the Document Properties (see Figure 7 below).

Figure 7. Entering metadata in the Document Properties

1. Go to the File menu and click on Properties

2. Enter the title and the author in the boxes provided

   Separate multiple authors with a semicolon, not a comma

3. Enter the author's institution or other affiliation in the Company box

The only disadvantage of the Document Properties is that it is unable to store font changes, such as italicised words. If your title contains special font formatting like this, it will still have to appear in the document body, in the proper Named Style, and with the relevant Character Styles for the formatting.

5.2. Getting rid of unwanted auto-styling

A number of Word's features are not wanted for publication-quality work. Many of them can be turned off in the ToolsAutoCorrect menu.

Figure 8. Turning off superscript ordinals

One in particular is the automated superscripting of ordinal numbers like 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd, which is a Victorian foible last seen in the closing years of the 19th century, and perpetuated in typewritten material when the use of the half-linefeed was available. It is never used in professionally-designed typesetting nowadays unless you are trying to create a typographic facsimile of the 1890s, but for obscure reasons Microsoft reintroduced it to Office users by making it the default in Word. Figure 8 above shows how to turn it off permanently.

For academic use, you may need to add styles for an Abstract and any other textual phenomena that are not otherwise identifiably provided for.