How Wildcards Can Help You Become a Better Editor

Written By Tara Whitaker

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure policy.

If you want to become a better editor without using generative AI, I’ve got your back. In this episode of The Modern Editor, I’m sharing another tool I’ve used for years to help me be productive and efficient: wildcards.

Listen in as I share what wildcards are, my opinions on them, and how they can help us in our editing.

  • Hey there, edibuddies. I wanna continue our previous discussions about how we can be the best editors we can be without the use of generative AI. And wildcards can be a great way to find consistency errors in a document, and they leave the judgment in the hands of us, the editor. And what better way to edit?

    Welcome to The Modern Editor Podcast, where we talk about all things editing and what it's like to run an editorial business in today's world. I'm your host, Tara Whitaker. Let's get to it.

    Hey there, friends. If you are a regular podcast listener, you already know this, but if you're a new listener, know that I am a big, big fan of being effective and efficient in our editing without losing our humanity. And today's episode about wildcards fits the bill perfectly. So I'm gonna share with you today what wildcards even are, my opinions about them, and how they can help us with our editing.

    So before we get really into it, I wanna get on my soapbox here a little bit. I often see some pushback on using wildcards because the consistency checks that they can help with can also be found with macros or PerfectIt, and that's 100% true. That's not, that's not BS. That's totally accurate. 

    But what's left out of the conversation is, one, an editor's familiarity and confidence with any of these tools, and two, how every single editor's brain works differently, and how one tool might be better to use for someone than a different tool. Yes, a macro can do multiple searches that a wildcard could do and faster, but if you're not familiar with macros and it's not something that you are interested in learning at the moment, that's okay. Just use the wildcards.

    Maybe it takes a few more seconds, or even, oh my gosh, a few more minutes. The world is still gonna continue to turn. Yes, all of these tools, including wildcards, can help with efficiency and productivity, but not at the expense of being more productive for the sake of it, or having it be tied to your worth.

    You, we wanna be real here. I'm in my fourteenth year of business. I just started using macros last year. PerfectIt, it's been a few years now. I probably should've looked it up, but not very long. Wildcards are the thing I've used the longest, and that is because the company that I work for, wildcards, or I should say caret codes, which I'll talk about in a minute, were included in part of my editing checklist.

    So I learned those first, and to be honest, they're my favorite. But guess what? I'm fourteen years into business, and I have a great, thriving editing business before I used any of those tools. So could I have been a few minutes faster? Sure. But I wasn't comfortable using them, so I didn't use them. The world did continue to turn.

    So off my soapbox now. Take that for what you will. Yes, I love me a good editing tool that doesn't use generative AI, but you have to do what's comfortable for you. Okay? And these are all, these all have a different learning curve to them. Some you might pick up faster than others. Depends on how your brain works. Yes, it will need practice, but it's all okay. You don't have to use these, okay?

    Now, I just did a workshop on wildcards in the Freelance Editors Club, and the two books that I used to build the workshop are called Brave New World by Chris Ryder and the Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word by Jack Lyon. Both books are free. They're PDFs. I will link them in the show notes. I highly recommend checking those out, so you can actually see the wildcards, the examples. 

    Brave New World has a bunch of troubleshooting, like the actual error code that Microsoft gives you and how to fix it if you get one of those while doing a wildcard search. Highly recommend both of those. Or, you know, you could check out the club, too, for access to the workshop. Hint, hint, wink, wink.

    Anyways, so what the heck is a wildcard? A wildcard is a character or a string of characters that represent or stand in for something. And this will get more clear as we go along.

    But the reason and the argument for using wildcards is so that it can help save your brainpower for more advanced editing that requires your expertise, and it can't be found with a tool or a shortcut. 

    So what I mean by that is none of these tools we've talked about on the podcast or in the club can help you find a plot hole. It can't help you find when a character's eye color changes from chapter to chapter. It doesn't do those things. So you can use PerfectIt, TextExpander, wildcards, macros, all of that to find the things that it can find, and then you're saving that brainpower for those other things that those tools cannot find.

    Wildcards are extremely helpful with technical editing or documents that have a lot of numbers and symbols and abbreviations and math equations, stuff like that. But they're also helpful with formatting, closing up hyphenated words, and character misspellings. So if you've got a character that's, you know, got one spelling in chapter one and then a different spelling in chapter two, and then in chapter ten it's totally different again, wildcards can definitely help with that.

    So when you're using Microsoft Word, which is where we're doing all of this work today, you're going to the “Advanced Find and Replace” window. All of these, except for the caret codes I'll talk about, cannot be used in that upper right-hand corner “Find” search box. You have to go into the advanced window and select “Use wildcards,” that little checkmark in the dropdown menu. Otherwise, it's just not gonna work. You're not gonna find anything. And yes, you have to turn it back off. Ask me how I know, or else you're also not gonna find anything. 

    And for some reason, my Microsoft Word, I will un-click it, leave the box, search for something, and it won't work, and I'll go back and that stinking checkbox is still checked. And I'm like, "I just unchecked this." So know that that might happen to you, too, 'cause, you know, we like to...Word likes to be finicky. 

    But I'm gonna go through some of these wildcards that you can use. It is a little tough to do by only audio. I'll do my best, 'cause I still think it's important to talk about here. I'm gonna share just a few of them, and then I'll share some examples, but I will also have them in the show notes so you can see them as a supplement, if that's helpful. 

    Okay, so the first wildcard is a question mark. A question mark we use to find one of something. So an example of this would be if you wanna look for a word that starts with B, has one more letter, and then ends with T, that wildcard string would look like this: b?t.

    And it would come up with bat, bet, bit, bot, but. Get it? So it's looking for one letter in between the B and the T. For the record here, and I said this during our workshop in FEC, some of these I'm like, eh, there's no reason to be looking for these kinds of things. They're just examples. Okay? I don't know why you would look for all three-letter words that have, you know, one letter in between B and T, but it's simply an example.

    And then when you get more advanced, which we're not gonna get into today, knowing the foundation and what each wildcard means, then you can combine them and build on them, and that is when it actually make sense and be able to find things that you would actually need to look for. Okay, moving on.

    The asterisk is similar to the question mark, but instead of just finding one of something, you're going to find multiple of something. Good example of this is if you type in cr*e. Now it's not a question mark. If it was, it would just be looking for one letter, so it'd be cr?e. We're looking for multiple letters, so it's gonna come up with crime, 'cause I and M, multiple letters. Create, 'cause that starts with C R and ends with E, and even something like crystalline, however you wanna say it. It's got a whole bunch of words in between there. That's what the asterisk does. So it can find lots of things. 

    Now chevrons are used for boundaries. So if you wanna search for something that begins and/or ends with a certain pattern, chevrons are what you use. So if you wanted to find all words that end in pit, like P-I-T, you would put a chevron at the end. So you'd go pit>. So you'd get like, sandpit or firepit. Again, not sure why you'd need to do that, but if you build them with each other, then it starts making sense.

    Okay. Square brackets help you find one of the things inside them. This is starting to get a little in the weeds, but let's give it a go. So let's say you wanted to look for all instances of sat and set. You would type in <s[ae]t>. And what that shows is, okay, we got the chevrons that's holding... You know, we've got the boundaries. We just want one word. We want it to start with an S. The next letter needs to be an A or an E, and then it needs to end in a T. That's getting a little... We're getting a little more complicated here, but that's what square brackets do. They help you find one of something inside of them. 

    And then the exclamation point is used to exclude things. So if you wanted to exclude something from your search, you would put an exclamation point immediately before whatever it is you want to exclude. If it's a letter, if it's a range of letters, whatever it may be, that's what the exclamation point is used for. 

    Now, there are more, but that's just a taste because I think if we get too into it, it's a little bit difficult to explain, like I said, via audio. But I'm going to put examples in the show notes, so don't fret. 

    But last and not least, I wanna talk about caret codes. So they're called caret codes. They are not technically wildcards apparently. I learned that reading those books that I mentioned before, but I'm not gonna lie, I just loop them in with wildcards because they...I don't know. I don't know why they're not called wildcards. They use a caret. A caret is a wildcard, so we're just going rogue, and we're gonna call them wildcards. Don't tell the authors of those books. I don't wanna get in trouble. 

    But these are the caret codes that I learned, like I said, many years ago when I started working for a company, and they request that you search for these things.

    So for example, ^p searches for a paragraph break. So what you could do is you could put a space before or after that ^p, and it would search for extra spaces that are after a paragraph, like, you know, say you have a sentence, a period, and then a space paragraph, which I don't know why, but I tend to do. Those get cleaned up in formatting. You can delete those. Or if you start a sentence and you throw in an extra space at the beginning, that's what it'll look for, too. 

    ^s finds nonbreaking spaces, so if you need to format your ellipses with nonbreaking spaces, you have to make sure you're putting in nonbreaking spaces and not just plain ones. That will help you find those. 

    ^t will look for tabs. So if an author uses tabs instead of indentation, you can search for those and get those out of there. 

    You know, there's more. I'll put them in the show notes as well. These help a ton with formatting. And yes, they all can be put into a macro, like FRedit. FRedit is a beast. FRedit's amazing. FRedit's a beast. So if you're like, "Eh, I'm not ready to go into that level of, you know, macros and tools and stuff," that's okay. Just use the “Find and Replace” function in Word. And for caret codes, you don't have to have that “Use wildcards” checkbox clicked.

    You can just use that upper right-hand find box, “Find” search box to look for those. They're very easy. Yes, if you have, you know, 500 tabs, I... You could go through them one by one. That's where I think “Replace” is going to be your best friend. If an author tends to have a space after every sentence, like at a paragraph break, that could be thousands. So your “Replace” function might be helpful there. 

    I wouldn't necessarily suggest going through them one by one. Have I done it in my very early editing days? Yes, 'cause I didn't know any better, and I was very nervous that I was gonna miss something, or that “Replace all” was gonna mess something up, and then I'd have to go back and try and fix it, and da, da, da, da.

    Do what's comfortable for you. Yes, it might take you way longer than it could if you used a “Replace all” or a macro or whatever, but it's also how we learn. It's okay. It's okay to not be the fastest editor in all the land. Like, yes, there are ways to make it a little more efficient. But it's also, it's just okay. It's all okay. You're still gonna do a great job. You're gonna ensure that everything is correct, and the more you do it and the more familiar you get with it, the more likely you are to do a little bit more of a “Replace all” or start experimenting with tools and all of that. So it's all okay. That's the summary of the episode. It's all okay.

    So there's a brief explainer on wildcards, how they can be helpful, when to use them. It's okay if you don't use them, but that's what they are. They don't use generative AI. They're not AI. They're built into Word. And if you wanna be able to see those visuals and me actually using them in a Word doc, that's where the Freelance Editors Club comes in handy.

    You join at the Cultivate tier, you get immediate access to the workshop. There is the free trial, as always, TaraWhitaker.com/Club. 

    And until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and remember to use tools that elevate your editing, not hinder it. 

    Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. If you enjoy The Modern Editor Podcast, I would be so grateful if you left a review over on Apple Podcasts or wherever you consume podcasts. And don't forget, you can head to TaraWhitaker.com to connect with me and stay in touch. We'll chat again soon.

Using Wildcards Versus Other Tools

Before we dive into what wildcards are, let’s talk about the pushback they get. There’s valid criticism that other tools, like PerfectIt and macros, can do the same things that wildcards can do, and faster.

While the criticism is valid, every editor has their own comfort level using different tools. Personally, I started with wildcards and didn’t adopt other tools until later in my editing journey. Bottom line: Use what works for you.

What Is a Wildcard?

A wildcard is a character or a string of characters that represents or stands in for something. Using wildcards can save your brainpower for more advanced editing that requires your expertise.  

For instance, a wildcard can’t help you find a plot hole. However, it will find an abbreviation issue, close hyphenated words, and help with formatting (plus tons of other stuff). 

How to Use Wildcards

In Microsoft Word, go to the “Advanced Find and Replace” window and select “Use wildcards.”  

Helpful Wildcard Examples

  1. Question mark: Say you want to find all the words that start with B, have a letter in the middle, and then end in T. You would type “b?t” into your wildcard search, and it would bring up all those words (think bet, bat, bit).

  2. An asterisk works similarly to the question mark, except that it doesn’t only look for one letter. For example, if you search for “cr*e,” it will populate all words that start with CR and end with E, no matter how many letters are in between (like crime and create).

  3. Chevrons are used for boundaries. For example, if you want to find all words that end with “-pit,” you search for “pit>,” and it would bring up words like sandpit or firepit.

  4. Square brackets help you find things inside them. Let’s say you want to look up all instances of set and sat in a manuscript. You would search for “<s[ae]t>.”

  5. Exclamation points are used to exclude things. When you want to exclude something from your search, simply put an exclamation point immediately before it.

What Are Caret Codes?

Another tool I loop in with wildcards (even though I just recently found out they aren’t actually wildcards) is caret codes. 

Here are a few examples:

  1. ^p searches for a paragraph break.

  2. ^s finds non-breaking spaces.

  3. ^t finds tabs.

Learn More Uses for Wildcards Inside the Freelance Editors Club

To learn more about wildcards and put them into practice, join the Freelance Editors Club to access the wildcards workshop. 

Important Sections:

  • (0:58) Explaining the Pushback Against Using Wildcards

  • (4:19) What Is a Wildcard?

  • (5:49) How to Use Wildcards

  • (6:45) Helpful Wildcard Examples

  • (10:54) What Are Caret Codes?

  • (12:34) Use the Tools That Work for You

  • (14:54) Learn More Inside the Freelance Editors Club

Resources Mentioned

Work with Me:

xo, Tara

Tara Whitaker
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