The Dangers of Find and Replace

Don’t get me wrong.  I truly love the editing tool of Word that allows me to replace character names with a few keystrokes.  But keep in mind that some truly amusing and annoying problems can crop up if you don’t think through things carefully enough.  For example, let’s say that you decided that a character should be described as skinny instead of thin.  So you type:

Find what: thin
Replace with: skinny. 

Suddenly ‘thing’ and ‘think’ become ‘skinnyg’ and ‘skinnyk.’  Not good!   

So writers beware!