Working with Track Changes: A Guide

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Debra Stephens
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1 Working with Track Changes: A Guide Prepared by Chris Cameron & Lesley-Anne Longo The Editing Company

Working with Track Changes: A Guide While many people may think of editors hunched over their desks, poring over sheaths of paper with red pens in hand, the reality is that with the advent of the

2 Working with Track Changes: A Guide While many people may think of editors hunched over their desks, poring over sheaths of paper with red pens in hand, the reality is that with the advent of the digital age, the way editors do their work has changed. Now, most editing is done onscreen, often using Microsoft Word, thanks to Track Changes. Track Changes is a function in Microsoft Word that allows users to see any changes made to a document, whether that s additions of text, deletions of text, moving text around, or making simple edits such as capitalizing or adding punctuation. Authors and editors can discuss changes thanks to the Comment feature, and any formatting changes made to the document show up as well. However, if you re unaccustomed to what a document edited with Track Changes looks like, it can be very overwhelming to see your edited document for the first time post-editing. So, we, the editors at The Editing Company, are here to give you some tips and information on using Track Changes if you re an author who is ready to start the editing process! Where to find it and how to turn it on and off Above, you ll see that the Track Changes function can be found under the Review tab at the top of the document. Click the Track Changes button and it will change colour, indicating it is on. The first drop down menu to the right of the button allows you to change what version of the document you see. The two used most often are Final: Show Markup, which shows you the final view of the document but also the edits made, and Final, which shows you what the clean copy will look like, with changes incorporated but not marked or visible. The newest version of Word (2013) also includes All Markup and Simple Markup as options for viewing your edits. The drop down list labelled Show Markup allows you to change what types of edits you see maybe you just want to see the formatting changes made, or perhaps just insertions/deletions. The third menu, labelled Reviewing Pane, just lets you move the column that shows your changes vertically or horizontally. What a marked-up document looks like When you first open a document in which the changes have been tracked, the sight can be a bit intimidating. Your writing could resemble a battlefield, with lines and colours and strike-throughs all over the place The Editing Company 1

3 Don t panic. You can deal with all these changes one at a time; but it helps if you know what each one means. Let s suppose that William Shakespeare had submitted his work to an editor who used the Track Changes feature (in his quill pen?). The Bard might have gotten something back that looked like Example 1. You can see that the editor has made a fair number of changes to the text. The first thing to note is that every line that contains a change has a vertical mark beside and to the left of it. This is handy for Ex. 1 finding edits that are hard to see such as inserted commas. When you have no more vertical lines, you have dealt with all your changes. We will examine each of these types of changes and what to do about them in more detail below. For now, just notice how the editor has deleted and replaced words like mashed, snow, and earth with strained, rain, and place (better choices, we think). The crossed-out green line has been moved from where the author wrote it to where the editor thinks it really belongs. Further down you can see that sceptre has been corrected so that it corresponds to British spelling rules. And the editor thought that the speech would be better off without the two lines towards the end, so he deleted them entirely. One other thing to be aware of is that the colours may be different depending on how many people edited the document and where and when you open it; they aren t always red and green. Example 1, above, shows the text in the Final: Show Markup or All Markup option of Track Changes. If you want to see what it will look like with all the edits in place and accepted, you can click on Final, and you will see something similar to Example 2. Ex. 2 It is important to know that switching to this view does not eliminate the tracked changes (see that you still have vertical lines down the left side); it just hides them. To get rid of the changes once and for all you need to accept or reject each one. We will show you how to do this later on. Inserting and deleting text Ex. 3 To the left is an example of the two most common edits deleting text, and adding text. If you look at the top line, you can clearly see that the word brown has been crossed out, indicating it has been deleted. Deleting a word, or even entire paragraphs, can be done by highlighting the text with your cursor and hitting Backspace The Editing Company 2

The second line shows a word that has been inserted, indicated by an underline. When adding or deleting text, be sure to check that the spacing between the newly changed words is correct.

The result is that there are now two spaces between The and fox something to watch out for.

Capitalizing Capitalizing words is as simple as deleting the letter you don t want (i.e., the uncapitalized one) and inserting the new capital letter in its place. Ex. 4 Punctuation Ex.

4 The second line shows a word that has been inserted, indicated by an underline. When adding or deleting text, be sure to check that the spacing between the newly changed words is correct. Otherwise, as you can see to the right in Example 3, in the first line, Ex. 3 the middle word has been removed, but the spaces on either side of it were not edited to compensate. The result is that there are now two spaces between The and fox something to watch out for. This image is showing what the text will look like once the changes have been accepted and incorporated (For more on how to accept changes, read on). Capitalizing Capitalizing words is as simple as deleting the letter you don t want (i.e., the uncapitalized one) and inserting the new capital letter in its place. Ex. 4 Punctuation Ex. 5 Seeing edits to punctuation while using Track Changes can be a bit tricky, just because the edits are so small they can be easy to miss. You may find it helpful to zoom in on the text a little more than you might normally have the zoom set to when copyediting, a zoom of 115% is often enough, but whatever you prefer. You can set the zoom level in the View tab at the top of the Word toolbar. As we mentioned above, the vertical lines to the left of each line that has been edited can also help you pick out small changes to punctuation. Changing punctuation functions the same way as exchanging a lowercase letter for a capital letter as outlined above. Simply delete the punctuation you do not want, and insert the punctuation you do want. You can see in Example 5 that the semicolon has been deleted and a comma was inserted instead. Deleting Paragraphs Ex. 6 Deleting paragraphs is basically the same as deleting a word you re just deleting a lot of them at once! Above is a simple example of a deleted paragraph. There is one reason why it s always a good idea to view your changes in Final mode (as discussed in Where to find it and how to turn it on and off), specifically when deleting extra space or lines between paragraphs. When you are deleting an empty line between two elements, be they paragraphs, figures, or anything, keep in mind that while you may delete that line, you will not see the text actually move up to compensate as you do when you are not using Track Changes The Editing Company 3

5 If you look at the example below, this is what you would see if you had deleted a paragraph and then removed the empty line space above it. You can see that the extra space is gone, indicated by the vertical line that appears alongside any line in which you have made edits. However, you can also see that it appears the text has not moved up to compensate. The text has moved up, but the reason why it appears it hasn t is to show a record of the fact that space was there, and now it has been deleted. Ex. 7 Because of this confusing quirk, it s a good idea to always check your paragraph spacing in Final mode to make sure that my changes have input as they should, and that there are no extra empty lines, or paragraphs that require more space between them. Comments in Track Changes and what to do about them For communicating between the author and editor(s), Track Changes offers a chance to place comments in a document alongside the text. The editor could use comments to ask a question of the author or to clarify the reasoning behind a particular change. Note that the display of these comments might vary slightly depending on what version of Word you are using. Let s return to our Shakespearean example. The editor has placed a number of comments to clarify the edits he made. The author will then see a screen that looks like the one found in Example 8: Ex. 8 Ex. 9 In Word 2013: William Shakespeare can respond to the comments or simply delete them. He does this by right-clicking in the comment box itself. A list resembling the one in Example 9 will appear The Editing Company 4

The author can now add his own comments. Note that the identity of each person to edit the document is automatically added to the comment box, as seen in Example 10.

If you want to reply to a comment in an older version of Word, sometimes the easiest option is to click on the comment, Ex.

6 The author can now add his own comments. Note that the identity of each person to edit the document is automatically added to the comment box, as seen in Example 10. In Word 2010 or earlier: Unfortunately, the Reply function is only available on Word If you want to reply to a comment in an older version of Word, sometimes the easiest option is to click on the comment, Ex. 10 press Enter to move down a line or two, and reply directly in the existing comment (you can use To Editor or From Author or similar to make things clearer). You can navigate through the comments using Previous and Next and add New comments or Delete existing ones (Example 11) by using the options in the Comments box in the Review tab. You can also clear all comments from the document at once. Ex. 11 When not to use Track Changes It can be easier to turn off Track Changes when you are moving major elements of text around. For example, if you have to reorganize a document, it is often best to do that without Track Changes on (but keep a copy of the original!), simply because it would be very difficult to read the end product with Track Changes turned on (discuss this approach with the author first, however). Also, it can be simpler to turn off Track Changes when making smaller formatting edits such as changing typefaces, removing extra space, adding heading styles, moving text around, etc. This is because Word doesn t always show these edits when Track Changes is on, but also because leaving Track Changes on while formatting can create a confusing, crazy looking document. In Example 12, this is what you would see if you had made just six formatting changes to one paragraph. Ex. 12 However, Word doesn t show any of the changes that have been made, as we discussed in the section on deleting paragraphs. To see what the final document looks like with these formatting changes incorporated, you have to switch back to Final viewing mode, as in Example The Editing Company 5

Ex. 13 For this reason, it is better to keep Track Changes off when formatting documents, for two reasons: (1) if Track Changes is on, you can t always see your formatting edits, and (2) you would

7 Ex. 13 For this reason, it is better to keep Track Changes off when formatting documents, for two reasons: (1) if Track Changes is on, you can t always see your formatting edits, and (2) you would end up with a completely filled comments column! Accepting and rejecting changes As we mentioned earlier, all changes remain part of your document until you either accept or reject them. Here we will show you the easiest way to do both these things. You ll remember that William Shakespeare was reviewing the changes his editor made in his speech from The Merchant of Venice. To accept a change and have it become a permanent part of the document, we look at the Review tab of the task bar at the top of the screen. Notice the options Previous and Next in the Changes box. These enable you to navigate back and forth through all the tracked changes. Ex. 14 Ex. 15 Clicking on the down arrow below Accept causes a list of options to appear (note: in Word 2013, the options will appear a little differently, but the functions remain the same). Note that there is an option to Accept All Changes at once. This would obviously save a lot of work, but there would be no chance to review what the editor has done, so only use this one if you have already reviewed everything and are sure you want to do this. It is also possible just to Accept This Change (Example 15). Accept and Move to Next is an efficient way of moving through all the changes one at a time and having the opportunity to accept or reject each one as you land on it. You can see in Example 16 that after accepting the change, the typo correction has now become a permanent part of the text. Ex The Editing Company 6

8 Let s suppose that Mr. Shakespeare actually preferred the word mashed to strained in the first line. He could reject the editor s change using the Reject option (Example 17) and his original version would become permanent (Example 18). (We can hope that he has a change of heart before the play is performed.) Ex. 17 Ex. 18 In this way an author can move though the document with complete control over all the editorial changes. Remember, a change will remain in the document until it is dealt with in this way. *** Using Track Changes to edit your work can be a tricky adjustment, but the new functionalities editors (and authors) gain from putting these new technological developments to use are worth the effort of learning how to use them! Track Changes has streamlined the editing process, making it possible for editors and authors from all around the world to correspond and work from wherever they are. Also, it can be so interesting to see how far your work has come, from the first draft all the way through to the final. And remember: if you have any questions or are unsure of anything, ask your editor! They will be happy to help. Looking for an editor? Give The Editing Company a call! Our editors are always happy to help you make your work the best it can be. us to find out more about our services. Or, try our free Quick Quote service. We ll evaluate 5 pages of your work and give you a sense of what the costs for editing might be The Editing Company 7

Using Microsoft Word's "track changes" editing feature: a short guide for authors and editors

Using Microsoft Word's track changes editing feature: a short guide for authors and editors Using Microsoft Word's "track changes" editing feature: a short guide for authors and editors This guide summarizes how to work with an editor who has used Microsoft Word's "track changes" feature to edit