A useful hack in MS Word

[hrj]

So the "problem" I wanted to find a solution for is that the first market I'm shipping Daughter of Mystery off to has a few less-common formatting requirements in their style sheet that will require a bit of hand-tweaking. The most significant part of these requirements is that their house style doesn't use the serial comma. There are a couple other similar items where they require one of two options that is different from my own default settings. A more minor issue are things like chapter formatting and whatnot.

When you combine this with the sure and certain knowledge that, at some point in my final just-about-out-the-door review, I will undoubtedly find more minor corrections and tweaks, and the realistic understanding that I may have to send it out to more than one publisher before it finds a home ... well, there's a potential for annoying amounts of re-work.

So it seemed to me that there should be a way to use the Track Changes function in Word to keep different classes of edits separate: one group that was just the style issues, one for the formatting specifics, one for substantial edits. So here's how it works:

1) Tracked changes are "tagged" with the reviewer's identity. This tag shows up when you view the document with one of the "show markup" options, and you can view only one reviewer's changes at a time using the "Show Reviewers" menu in the Reviewing toolbar.

2) The reviewer's identity is taken from the "user information" panel in the Preferences menu. Change the user name in that panel and new edits will be tracked under that identity with previous edits tracked under the previous identity. Change the identity back to some previously used name, and new changes under that name will be tracked in the same group as the previous changes under that name.

3) Tracked changes can be accepted (incorporated into the document with no history-trace) or rejected (removed from the document entirely) wholesale as well as one as a time. But there's also an option for "accept/reject all changes shown".

4) So if I want to accept only "substantial edits", I select to view only the edits by the identity I used to make them and then "accept all changes shown". Conversely, if I want to revert only one specific set of formatting options, I select to view only the reviewer associated with that set of changes and "reject all changes shown".

It takes a bit of paying attention when making changes under the specialized identities so that I don't reflexively fix other things while using that identity. And the version that I'll be sending off for consideration will be an "accept all changes" version of final edit, to avoid confusing and subsequent editors of that file. And, of course, magical thinking means that, having gone through all this trouble to make life easier for subsequent submissions with other requirements, all the work will be for nothing because my first market will snap it up. Right?

Comments

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I loves me my magical thinking, so of course that will happen.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hang on. This market wants you to submit in conformity with their style-sheet, including serial-comma prejudice et al...?

Oh, fer cryin' out loud! These are matters for the copy-edit stage, after - maybe long after - they've accepted the work and are committed to it. Emphatically not to be imposed on hopefuls as a prerequisite for submission. I am struggling somewhat to find a word to describe such a demand, but "professional" is not anywhere in the lexicon.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

(Obviously I wish you luck anyway, but honestly...!)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

*shrug* In principle, I agree with you. But this is most assuredly a professional (small) press and is a major player in the lesbian fiction market. I rather suspect this is a combination of filtering out amateurs who can't follow directions and a matter of not having an enormous post-acceptance editorial budget. Probably a bit more of the former than the latter.

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking it matters what market you are writing for. If it's for people who are looking for a historical document or a thesis of some sort, I suppose all these details are vital....but if you are writing for folks who just love a good story, perhaps you should relax a bit and let them have that good story without all the worry about all the details you mentioned in your last posting.

It's a fun read. and historically possible. That is enough for my kind of reader.

[xrian.livejournal.com]

The scuttlebutt I hear (and probably you do too) is that copyediting by the publisher is now considered an expensive "frill", so increasingly authors are being expected to do their own. Certainly the works some of them put out show a decided lack in that department.

I most admit that's also one of my quarrels with Kindle books -- quite a few of them show clear signs that no copyeditor has so much as glanced through them after the text transfer. There are split words, run-together words, homonyms, and some very clear optical character-reading errors in distressing and annoying abundance.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

I think you have found a brilliant solution to your problem, and even if your story is accepted at the first submission (and I hope that it is!), the effort you went to to devise this work-around to different markets having different rules will be worth it, because sooner or later you will actually want to undo specific sorts of edits, if not for this one, then for another.

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

On the clever hack: there are lots of version-control systems that enable you to create "branches", edit on different branches separately, and (if you wish) merge the branches back together. But it sounds like MS Word reviewers are enough for your purposes.

On copy-editing: I published a book two years ago through a reasonably-respectable academic publisher (College Publications) that had (AFAICT) no copy-editing budget whatsoever. Authors were expected to send camera-ready copy (although that wasn't a prerequisite for accept/reject decisions). Of course, copy-editing technical academic writing is probably a lot more expensive than copy-editing fiction, and most academic authors are used to typesetting their own equations and figures anyway.