Easy way to check two word spelling?

[Bonsai Bill]

I have a problem that others must have solved already, I hope. I am writing a
technical book and need some way to insure that two-word combinations are
correctly spelled as two words, one word or hyphenated. I have a list of
problem combinations and wonder if that could be used some way.

it is complicated by fact that two words could be hyphenated one time but
not another. For example, could have "at high pressure" or "high-pressure
test". Is there some way to take advantage of the spellchecker or have a VBA
macro that searches for list of word combinations and asks if spelling should
be checked?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[grammatim]

You could do a find-replace for the phrase, first spelled with the
hyphen set to replace without it, looking at each example and clicking
"Replace" or "Find Next"; and then do it again for the phrase without
the hyphen set to replace with the hyphen.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Traditional copy editors do this manually, using a sheet of paper divided
into four panels (roughly distributing the alphabet) and noting any specific
word treatment to use consistently. You could do the same thing with a 2 x 2
table in a document, but of course Word's ability to sort would make it easy
to keep your notes alphabetized without need for this distribution.

I guess what I'm getting at is that, no, there's not going to be any magic
automatic way to do this; it's going to come down to a "manual" effort, but
if you keep a record of the decisions you've made about certain treatment,
then you'll have something to refer to. You'll note "high pressure (n.)" and
"high-pressure (adj.)" as separate listings.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[Bonsai Bill]

Thanks for your responses. Unfortunately they were not the responses I was
looking for. However, they were not unexpected either.

Your replies did give me an idea though. I am going to not hyphenate any
words in the initial draft. i will then write a macro that does a search and
replace on all of the word pairs and do it with Track Changes on. I then
manually will check all proposed changes and either accept or reject the
replace. It will be ugly but at least the possible changes will be flagged.