You’ve completed your story and you’re reasonably happy with it. Now you’d like to fine tune your work, seek out and destroy passive writing, crutch phrases, misspellings, and poor grammar.

Editors come from everywhere to help you; family, friends, online critique partners, your publisher, your freelancer. Before you consult with any of them, I'd like to introduce you to the editor in Word. You may already have met her when using the Find and Replace commands, but there's so much more she can do for you via the settings for Autocorrect, AutoFormat, Spelling and Grammar.

Once you've exhausted the talents of Word, you'll want to work with people. The Track Changes function is an incredible tool to make that happen. I'll show you how to simplify it's use for fiction writers.

Once you've exhausted their talents, Word has a secret weapon that it shares with Adobe Reader to catch all those hated little typos that sneak past the sharpest eyes—text-to-speech functionality—called Speak in Word, Read Out Loud in Adobe Reader. In the exercises, I'll show you how to use both apps to read your words out loud so you can hear the typos and bloopers.

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Join the private Facebook group @MasteringWord to chat with Joan and other students and get your questions answered.

You may also add a question to the comment section at the end of each lecture.