Writers: here's a tip that may help you avoid embarrassment and lawsuits

  

I once decided to change a real name to a fake name in a book I was writing to avoid embarrassing someone who might not want to be written about. I also thought I might get sued for what I said about her.

I used MS Word’s "Find and Replace" feature which quickly made about a dozen substitutions in one chapter.

But when I read through the chapter I was surprised to find a few instances of the old name which had escaped the Find function.

It’s important to do a manual verification because Word might not notice hyphenated words or words with apostrophes or in their plural form as targets for replacement.

Don’t lose a friend or risk a lawsuit by publishing a wrong name or word.