Review Tab
You will find everything related to Track Changes on the Review tab of the ribbon in Word.
Select Spelling & Grammar to have Word do a spelling and grammar check. Depending on your settings, you may already see spelling and grammar issues via squiggly lines in the manuscript. But it’s useful to do a last check before sending it back to the client to make sure you didn’t overlook anything. The tool will give you options to ignore the suggested change or to make it. There are also additional options sometimes, depending on the circumstances, such as an Ignore All button. Word also takes you to the appropriate part of the manuscript where it’s suggesting a change. There, you may decide to manually make a different change than the one suggested.
Do you have an author who has a pet word that he uses frequently? Double-click on the word to select it, then select Thesaurus to get a list of synonyms. If applicable, it also includes the different possible meanings of the selected word so that you can quickly narrow down your choices. For example, for the word “wipes,” the thesaurus gives possible meanings of “smears,” “cleans,” and “erases,” with synonyms for each.
Be careful with this tool though. If you have an area selected, it will apply the word count to only the selected area. For example, I selected a single paragraph in the same document as the one above and got these results instead:
Comments
Comments are one of the most valuable tools for editors. You can use them to call attention to an area and make suggestions to the authors on how to change it. You can use them to explain why you made a change. You can also use them to make notes to yourself—just remember to come back and clean those up before you send the manuscript to the client!
To use comments, first select an area of the manuscript by clicking and dragging (or using keyboard shortcuts Shift + arrow keys), then select New Comment from the Review tab of the ribbon (or Ctrl + Alt + m on the keyboard). You’ll get a window to the side of the manuscript in which you can enter comments.
Comments are critical for communicating with the author at the point where it matters. You would not want to point out an issue in a paragraph by saying, “on page 57, third paragraph,” because that location may change as you or the author make edits. A comment will stick with the associated text no matter whether you or the author add or delete text above it.
Using the icon in the upper right corner of the comment, you can also reply to existing comments. This is useful if you and the author are having a conversation back and forth. You can maintain the original comment as well as the history on it.
By right-clicking on the comment, you can also mark it as complete or delete it. Marking it complete keeps it within the document, but it fades and minimizes so that you know you don’t need to worry about its content any further.
On the other hand, once you delete a comment, it is gone from the document. It’s useful to delete comments that you made to yourself that you don’t necessarily want the author to see. For example, on your first pass through a manuscript, you may make a note that you need to come back and think about something some more, or you need to see how the rest of the plot plays out before making a recommendation. Or, if you’re doing a developmental edit or manuscript critique, you may record your gut reaction to something, which may be a little too harshly worded for the author.
If you do make comments to yourself, consider adding something you’ll remember to every comment so that you can easily search for them. It should be something that wouldn’t appear in the manuscript or in your comments to the author. For example, maybe you can use your initials or your dog’s name. You’re going to delete these comments before they go to the author, so it can be something completely nonsensical, as long as it’s easy for you to remember and to apply to each comment that’s for your eyes only. For example, I use “*CN” for mine. My initials could possibly show up in the manuscript (unlikely, but possible), but they definitely won’t appear with an asterisk. Before I send the manuscript back to the author, I can do a quick search for “*CN” to make sure I’ve deleted all of the comments that were not meant for the author.
Track Changes
For example, here’s a letter-by-letter change:
And here’s a word change:
As you can see, when deleting and re-entering the entire word, it’s easier to see the end result.
If you prefer a cleaner view while working on the manuscript, you can click on the vertical line, and the text will only show what it would look like with your changes. This view is called Simple Markup. The vertical line will change to red as an indication that there are changes hidden from view.
I often switch back and forth between views while I’m editing depending on the situation. For example, it’s difficult to tell what happened with a formatting change, such as removing a paragraph break, while seeing the details of Track Changes in All Markup view. But if I switch views, I can easily see if it’s now formatted the way I intended.
The Tracking section of the ribbon has some other views. Click on the top menu to the right of the Track Changes button to see your options. See “All Markup” in the image below.
We already discussed All Markup and Simple Markup. The No Markup option shows what the document would look like if all changes were accepted and all comments were deleted. There is no vertical line to indicate that there are changes nor is there indication that there are comments. The Original option shows the original document before there were any changes or comments. I don’t use these two views very frequently, but it’s useful to know they exist.
In the “Show Markup” menu just below the views (see image above), you can select what you want to see when viewing markup. I generally turn off Formatting. If I make a change to formatting, I don’t generally want to see a bubble to show that change to me. Here’s an example of changing a word to italics:
The last thing I want to point out is that there are some advanced options available.
If you click on the small icon in the bottom right corner of the Tracking section of the ribbon (see image above), a new window will open.
You can change some options within this window, and even more by clicking on the Advanced Options button. I’ll leave these options for you to explore on your own.