Finding Contractions

The house style guide in Beth's company mandates that contractions be avoided within prose. She wonders if there is a setting within Word or some way that she can easily find contractions. She can't just search for apostrophes, as they could be used in possessives.

There is no easy way to do this in Word. And I agree with Beth—it is tedious to search for all the apostrophes and manually evaluate each one. That, however, may be the best way to handle the situation.

As Beth notes, an apostrophe can be used in a contraction and to indicate a possessive. If Beth's style guide is like many that I've seen, there are probably rules relating to how possessives need to be handled, so it isn't a matter of ignoring possessives, but also finding those and making sure they are handled correctly.

It is possible to create a macro that would go through a document and find common contractions such as don't, doesn't, won't, you're, and so on. Once found, these could be replaced with their full form (do not, does not, will not, you are, and so on). This might seem to be a timesaver, but it can create a much bigger problem if the contractions are within quoted material. After the macro, the quotes would no longer be accurate.

Of course, the macro could simply mark all the common contractions using yellow highlighting, which would allow you to check each highlighted occurrence and determine if a change should be made. This doesn't seem to provide any benefit, however, as every apostrophe will still need to be checked—both the marked, common contractions and the left-over apostrophes used in uncommon contractions or possessives.

To find apostrophes and do your checking, rely on using Find and Replace. If you do a wild card search, you can use this pattern in the Find What box:

[A-z]{1,}[''][A-z]{1,}

This will find 1 or more letters followed by an apostrophe followed by 1 or more letters. I'm not sure if it is clear in the above pattern line or not, but there are two types of apostrophes included between the square brackets in the middle of the pattern. The first is a straight apostrophe and the other is a smart (curly) apostrophe. This will catch both straight-quote and curly-quote apostrophes that may be in the document. You may need to copy the two different apostrophes from elsewhere and then paste them in.

Alternatively, you can use the following pattern in the Find What box, using caret codes for the straight and curly quotes:

[A-z]{1,}[^039^0146][A-z]{1,}

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