Showing vs. Telling Macro

by @CKMacLeod

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Most writers are familiar with the adage, show, don’t tell. But sometimes it’s tricky to determine when those telling instances have crept into your writing.

Editor Janice Hardy of Fiction University explains how telling happens and offers advice for how to turn telling into showing. She and Valerie Comer of To Write a Story suggest lists of words you should avoid to prevent instances of telling.

I’ve inserted some of Valerie Comer’s and Janice Hardy’s telling words into the macro script below so you can identify them in your own writing. I’ve also included some words of my own.

Loch Ness telling sample
TellingWords in action; writing sample by Carla Douglas, used with permission

Copy the TellingWords* macro, below, from Sub to End Sub and paste it into Word’s Visual Basic Application (VBA). When you run the macro, it will hunt down and highlight those telling words so you can tell them, I mean, show them who’s boss.


Sub TellingWords()
‘ Highlights telling words


‘ Written by Roger Mortis, revised by Subcortical, adapted by Jami Gold and tweaked by C.K. MacLeod; word list by Valerie Comer and Janice Hardy

Dim range As range
Dim i As Long
Dim TargetList
TargetList = Array(“was”, “were”, “when”, “as”, “the sound of”, “could see”, “saw”, “notice”, “noticed”, “noticing”, “consider”, “considered”, “considering”, “smell”, “smelled”, “heard”, “felt”, “tasted”, “knew”, “realize”, “realized”, “realizing”, “think”, “thought”, “thinking”, “believe”, “believed”, “believing”, “wonder”, “wondered”, “wondering”, “recognize”, “recognized”, “recognizing”, “hope”, “hoped”, “hoping”, “supposed”, “pray”, “prayed”, “praying”, “angrily”)

For i = 0 To UBound(TargetList)

Set range = ActiveDocument.range
With range.Find
.Text = TargetList(i)
.Format = True
.MatchCase = False
.MatchWholeWord = True
.MatchWildcards = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
Do While .Execute(Forward:=True) = True
range.HighlightColorIndex = wdPink
Loop
End With
Next
End Sub


Note: You need to use judgement with the results of any macro. This macro will highlight the telling words, but only you can decide if it’s an instance of telling.

To figure out what to do with the words the macro highlights, refer to Janice Hardy’s excellent show vs. tell posts. Also, this macro is a work in progress. Are there words I should include? Omit? Let me know in the comments section below.

Not sure what a macro is? See this post for an explanation. See also the videos for adding a macro and running a macro in Microsoft Word 2010.

What do you do with the highlighted words this macro finds? See Carla Douglas’ post at the Beyond Paper Editing blog for suggestions.

 Image by Pete

*Karen Woodward calls this macro the AddWords macro because you can add any list of words that you want the macro to find. The first version of this macro was written by Roger Mortis, revised by Subcortical, appropriated for writing by Karen Woodward, tweaked byJami Gold, and further tweaked by me, making it a true community effort.