How do I search for any word followed by a verb?

[Guest]

It's me again, trying to give instructions to students on how to search for
certain problems in their writing. Many problems can be found by doing a
search for certain pronouns and certain verbs together. For instance, "there
is" and "there are" and "there was" and "there were" are all good places to
think about revising. Instead of making the students search for those four
separate strings, is it possible to search for "there" + all forms of the
verb "to be" somehow? Or for "that" and all forms of the verb "to have." It
seems like, in Word, I cannot use "Find all forms" in combination with
another word like "there" or "that."

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Just searching for "there" would probably find mostly examples of such
expletive constructions.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Jezebel]

Word's Find and Replace has no notion of parts of speech: it deals only with
sequences of characters. Using wildcards, you can manage some alternative
word forms in the same search, but there's no way to handle suppletions, let
alone null copulas (such as you'd need for in the example cited).

Challenging as it may be, proof reading is still the only effective method.

 

[Guest]

Absolutely, this is just something to help students have the editing
experiences that can lead them to edit their work in the normal fashion. So,
what about if I did a Find and Replace for all forms of the verb "to be" and
highlighted them all with blue, say, and then tried to do a separate search
for "there" followed by any blue word. Can I do that? I don't think it allows
me to make distinctions about color in a string.

 

[Jezebel]

No. There's no way to search forms of a verb, nor any way to search for
mixed formatting.

 

[Guest]

Thanks so much for your help! It's extremely useful to know that it cannot be
done, so that I don't continue to fiddle with it!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Your statement is perhaps a bit broad. If I enter the text "be is was been
are were" and use Find to search for "be" with "Find all word forms"
checked, Word stops on each of those words.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

I think she meant in the context of my question. To find all forms of the
verb "to be" you just type "be" (or any other form of the verb) and select
"Find all forms" as an option and it will find all forms of the verb "to be."
I was asking about combining that search with other types of searches and she
is right, it can't do that.

 

[Bob S]

Someone who knew VBA could write a macro that (for example) searched
for each occurrence of "there" and then checked whether the next word
was any form of "be".

By the way, "find all word forms" does not find negated forms such as
"weren't"; a sufficiently clever macro could check for all such forms
as required.

If you are interested you might try asking in one of the VBA groups.

Bob S

 

[Bob S]

Someone who knew VBA could write a macro that (for example) searched
for each occurrence of "there" and then checked whether the next word
was any form of "be".

By the way, "find all word forms" does not find negated forms such as
"weren't"; a sufficiently clever macro could check for all such forms
as required.

If you are interested you might try asking in one of the VBA groups.

Bob S