by
Jennie Ruby
Whether you work on publications or on business documents, you need a plan before proceeding. Your plan should list the steps you take to shepherd a document from draft to final version. Your plan might include all the steps in a formal publication procedure from peer review to proofreading, or it might be as basic as "save a copy of the original before editing." To make your plan, you must answer some questions about your needs and methods.
Do you need to track changes?
Microsoft Word's Track Changes tool allows you to show the changes you make to a document. If you do not need to show the exact changes you made to the document, you may be able to skip this step. Here are some situations in which tracked changes are necessary:
- When you are copyediting scientific or technical material and the author or reviewer must verify that your changes do not alter the technical meaning
- When you need the author's approval of all the changes for any reason
- When you need to see changes made by multiple reviewers and determine which ones to accept if there is a conflict
- When you are training the writer to improve, so the writer needs to see the changes you made to the document
- When your editing work is under review
- When you simply want to see what you've done
Some authors may find it easier to review the document without tracked changes. In those cases, by all means skip tracking the changes and send the revised document for review
Do you need to track changes from multiple people?
If you want to see the changes multiple people make to the file, the best method is to protect the document for tracked changes before you send it out for reviews or share it on a network or webpage. This guarantees that the changes others make to the file will be tracked.
Do you need to track every single change?
Routine mechanical changes to a document, such as changing from two spaces to one after a sentence or moving periods inside closing quotation marks, may not be worthy of tracking. The reason you track changes is so that a reviewer who disagrees with a change can tell you to reverse it. Many of these small mechanical changes are not up for discussion because they are part of an editorial style.
A change that cannot be disagreed with does not need to be tracked. When you use the track changes tool, you can readily turn the tracking on and off to control which changes are tracked and which are not.
On the other hand, if even the smallest change must be reviewed, you may need to track every single change you make to the document. Using the Compare tool instead of the Track Changes tool will guarantee that every single change is marked.
Managing the Document Creation Process
Although most of my new Editing with Microsoft Word 2007 book is intended for the editing process after a document has been drafted, many editors are responsible for managing the creation of large, multi-author documents such as proposals and reports. If you are responsible for editing and formatting such a document, Word has some unique tools to help.
Styles and Quick Styles
Styles are predefined formats that can include both character and paragraph formatting. By using styles you can quickly and consistently format a long document. You can also give multiple documents a consistent appearance. Word comes with an extensive set of predefined styles, but you can also design your own. You can add your styles to the Quick Styles gallery, and you can limit the selection of styles for a particular document. The Styles task pane offers tools for inspecting and managing styles and for creating new styles.
Templates
A template is a formatted sample document that writers can use to type new text in the proper format. A template can contain styles and other design elements. You can limit the selection of styles so that writers turn in properly formatted documents.
About the Author: Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and
"Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. Jennie specializes in electronic editing. At the American Psychological Association, she was manager of electronic publishing and manager of technical editing and journal production. Jennie has an M.A. from George Washington University and is a Certified Technical Trainer (Chauncey Group). She is a publishing professional with 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.
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Join Jennie in our online classes (she'll be teaching two upcoming classes for IconLogic): Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts and Editing with Microsoft Word 2007.
