(Microsoft Tips for Teachers: Word)

In this activity students find and replace text in a document. Some applications in the classroom are:

• replace proper nouns in a story with pronouns;
• find prepositional phrases in a document and replace them with other prepositional phrases (e.g. replace "on the table" with "under the chair") to see how the meaning of the story changes;
• find and replace an overuse of specific adjectives in a story (that the teacher creates on purpose) with different adjectives to see how the meaning of the story changes, and also becomes a better story;
• find an incorrect verb tense and replace it with a correct form (e.g. replace "were" with "will be");
• find and replace an incorrect date or person's name throughout a long report;
• have students find mistakes in a document the teacher creates about the New England states or the planets, for example, and have the students fix the mistakes using Find/Replace (e.g. replace "Connecticut" is the smallest state with "Rhode Island" or replace "Jupiter" is the closest planet to the sun with "Mercury");
• find a large title throughout a report and replace it with an abbreviation instead (e.g. find " United States of America " and replace it with " USA ").

How To:

1. Have students open a file that contains text that needs to be replaced. In this example, the students will find the adjective "some" throughout a story and replace it with more meaningful adjectives that make the story more exciting.
2. Choose Edit, Replace (or press [CTRL]-H) to bring up the Replace dialog box.
3. Have the students replace "some" with a more meaningful adjective such as "five," or whatever quantity fits into the story. Type "some" in the Find What box and type "five" in the Replace With box (see picture).
   
   
4. Click Find Next to have Word search through the document for the first occurrence of the word "some."
5. Click Replace to have the word replaced, or click Find Next to skip this occurrence and search for the next one.
6. Continue replacing adjectives in the document.
7. Click Cancel if you want to stop replacing, or continue until there aren't any more words to replace.
8. Save your version of the document then print it for the teacher.