Tracking Changes and Comments

I understand that a lot of people know how to use this feature. However, when I first started I did not know how to do this and it is very important for any author to be able to do this.

To track changes in your own work, you click on tools "track changes" and then make sure that "Highlight changes" is selected in the box. If you have .docx I think it is located under editing - but if you have the "starter" version of the latest MS Word you will not be able to access the feature. I prefer the old MS Word, so I only have the .docx starter. (I am thinking about upgrading but I hate 2013, so I want an older version than that.) Everything you do to change the document will be visible (if you delete a line will go through it; if you add it will appear in the color your chose).

If you receive a document with changes tracked and you want to accept or reject them: Under the "tools" menu in Word, you should see a "track changes" icon. Under that you need to select "accept or reject changes" and make sure "highlighted changes" is selected. Then you can just click "find" and it will find the next change I made in the document, and you can click "accept" or "reject" for each one. You also need to uncheck the "highlight changes" box if you are going to keep working on the document.

Alternatively, you can right click on each change in the document and "accept" or "reject" should appear as one of your options. This is sometimes hard to do if the editor has only changed one letter or added punctuation.

 

Comments are found under the "insert" menu. (Also not available in Starter.) These are actual information about your story. A person can leave you a note directly in text. The text they are talking about becomes highlighted and when you pass your cursor over it you can see the note. Again you can right click to get rid of it. You can also use these to make notes to yourself.

 

Similarly, you can add comments to PDF files. If you pay big bucks for the upgrade, there are additional options for editing.

Editing, Content Editing, Proofreading, Copyediting, Beta readers

Many people do not know what these terms mean, so I am going to make them the topic of today's blog.

Generally, a novel (or any written work) goes through at least one edit, it is formatted,  and then a proofread is done. There are, however, two different types of editing: traditional editing, which covers spelling, grammar, and punctuation; and content editing, which actually changes words and sentence structure to make the novel flow better. In addition, a content editor may tell the writer that certain parts of the novel do not make sense and need more explanation or why some parts need to be removed. A proofreader does traditional editing and makes sure that the novel is formatted the same throughout (for example, they will fix it if you accidentally used "body text" style with size 24 font on the chapter 6 heading instead of "Heading 1" with 14 point font that you used for the rest of your book.

Sometimes newer authors have a content edit done and then a regular edit afterward especially if they are uncertain about their writing style. Other new authors do not want to lose their "voice," and so they only want a traditional edit. Sometimes authors want to have two or three traditional edits done on their work by different people.

All editors should be familiar with "track changes" in MS Word and the "comments" feature. However, if you want the same editor to do multiple types of editing and/or proofreading, they should submit it to you at the end of each process. This is because it can get kind of messy and becomes very difficult to do a good job unless the changes done are accepted and notes are cleared. I will talk about this in my next post. Some of my employers want me to submit a document with the feature on and a second one with all the changes accepted, but I recommend writers go through and check each change themselves unless it is a content edit (sometimes employers do not even want me to use the track changes feature for this).
Beta readers are people who will voluntarily go through your work and give you tips about the story. They are good for picking out inconsistencies. They will fix grammar and spelling as well. In exchange, you need to list them in your acknowledgement section of your book. I will have more on beta readers in a while.

Copywriting is basically writing advertising, but copyediting is just another word for editing. A copyeditor and an editor are the same.

In general, non-fiction costs more to edit because of the references. Content editing and proofreading are more expensive than just editing for grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

What?

For the most part projects are very straightforward. However, occasionally I come across one that leaves me shaking my head.

For example, today someone posted a job looking for an editor, but he just wanted the editor to highlight the areas where he was overly wordy and make changes but tell him first or not make changes. He also had no clue who his audience was but he thought it might be good to identify one and then he had no clue how to write toward his target audience unless they were really young or really old.

The topic of his book: Writing for Clarity.

What? Um, excuse me, but if you, yourself cannot write clearly nor can you even post a project in such a way that makes it easy for those reading it to understand what exactly it is you want - perhaps you should consider writing on something that you are more expert in: Writing for Ambiguity.

A long time ago before e-publishing, author's had to be experts in their field in order to publish books. Now they do not. In fact, they do not have to know anything about their topic. It makes me very leery of using any modern book for research, since there are several self-publishing companies that are masquerading as real publishing companies.

If you are planning on writing a non-fiction book, my advice to you is to identify your audience first. If you write a book and then afterward decide that your audience is going to be biochemists, it will be a bear to go back in and add biochemist language to the book, remove references to things a standard biochemist would know (but Joe next door would not know unless he, too, was a biochemist), and finally explain things that biochemists would not know, such as how to bake a cake in an oven instead of in beaker on a hotplate. Identifying your audience is one of many keys to publishing any book successfully.

Needless to say, I did not apply for this project. However, several other people did. Personally, even if I was rewriting his book or him so that it truly did speak of clarity in clear language, would I really want other people thinking that he wrote it and coming to him for information on the topic? Nope. Sorry, my drive for money is not quite that strong.