Highlight Words With Find and Replace

Words Matter
This post goes hand in hand with my post from my 30 Days of Editing Strategies, specifically Day 28 where I demonstrate an activity where writers can eliminate Crutch and Filter words.
 
Microsoft Word includes several different colors for highlighting text. This can be useful when looking for patterns of Crutch and Filter words that are detrimental to our writing by allowing us to use less powerful words or repetitious language that either bore our readers or pull them away from the action in a sequence.
 
Imagine searching for all the possible words that are "trouble" words or phrases and having them highlighted in different colors at the beginning of the editing process so that as you start working through your manuscript they jump out at you as items that possibly need some correction. That is the power behind using the highlighter in word. (Alternately, if you have a lot of different types of words or phrases you want to stand out, you can use font coloring as well.)
 
For example, if your goal is to eliminate the words "thing" and "stuff" and provide more powerful  descriptions, you could have all those words highlighted in the color green. If you also wanted to catch as many adverbs as you could in order to exchange them for more powerful verbs, you could highlight them in an alternate color like light blue.
 
Rather than finding all of the words and manually highlighting them, you can use Word's very powerful Find and Replace feature.
 
Find and Replace with Highlighting
In these instructions, I will use the examples provided above for "thing" and "stuff" (green) and "ly " words (light blue).

1. In the Home tab of the ribbon, click on the drop-down menu selector for the Highlighter icon.
2. Set the highlighter color to green.
3. From the Editing group, choose Replace from the menu.
4. Type "thing" (without the quotation marks) into both the "Find what" and "Replace with" boxes.
   Leave your cursor in the "Replace with" box.
5. Click the More button.
6. Click the Format button and choose Highlight. (see image below)
   This will add a line under the "Replace with" box indicating the Highlight format will be applied as the find and replace is completed.
7. Click the Replace All button.
8. Close the Find and Replace box and do a quick scroll of your document to confirm the replace has added the highlighting.
9. Type "stuff" (without the quotation marks) into both the "Find what" and "Replace with" boxes.
10. Click the Replace All button.
11. In the Home tab of the ribbon, click on the drop-down menu selector for the Highlighter icon.
12. Close the Find and Replace box and do a quick scroll of your document to confirm the replace has added the highlighting.
13. Set the highlighter color to light blue.
14. Type "ly " (with the space after the letter Y and without the quotation marks) into both
15. the "Find what" and "Replace with" boxes.
16. Click the Replace All button.

 
To Remove all the Highlighting from your Manuscript:

1. Press Control + A to select the whole document.
2. In the Home tab of the ribbon, click on the drop-down menu selector for the Highlighter icon.
3. Select No Color.