“Track changes” is at once a great tool but can be a
somewhat cumbersome tool. I use it in two ways. I find it worth the perseverance.
Track changes for first / second edit
The second edit is after major changes have been made to the
structure of the story. Some work may have been done on character and setting as
well. This edit often does not take place for stories that appear in our mixed author
anthologies: we wouldn’t select the story if it had faults like this.
So, for edit 1 in individual short stories, or edit 2 in
single author collections or Red Telephone novels I use the Comments function within
the Track Changes function. This highlights a bit of text and puts a comment in
the margin. I ask writers to leave the comment there and perhaps add their own.
They can also add further comments elsewhere in the text.
Of course one could just add comments in a different
coloured text but there are two disadvantages:
1. It’s
quite difficult to position the comment
2. You
lose the function of seeing who made which comment
We’re commenting here mainly on such things as is the dialogue
consistent? Is the writer showing not telling? Is there some awkward
expression?
Track changes in second / third edit
By this time the writer has reacted to the editor’s comments
and maybe made some alterations. The editor has also reacted to any comments
the writer has made. We now have a text that is mainly acceptable to both parties.
We now use the full function of Track Changes but work with
it not showing the changes and urge writers to read not allowing the mark-up to
show. A marked up text is very confusing and I personally find it to difficult to
know what I’m writing when I can see all of the changes.
We’re picking up here odd things we’ve missed in the previous
edit. Or it may be that an attempted alteration has not quite worked – e.g. the
writer may have added new text but not deleted the previous version. We might
need to adjust something to fit our house-style e.g. We like hyphens and we put
thoughts in italics. Or it just might be that an odd bit of dialogue has been set
out wrongly. We don’t change anything major at this point.
Naturally, we’re not infallible. If something seems completely
wrong, the writer can turn the mark-up on and reject that change. They can also
make other changes for the editor to approve.
Once all changes are approved the text is ready for the next
stage. This may sound like a lot of toing and froing but in fact it’s usually
all accomplished in one exchange.
Track Changes is as good as its word: it keeps track of all
the changes until they’re approved. It’s difficult to achieve this another way.
Note, the text will have three more proof reads but that’s a
story for another day.
