-
This exercise is for students who have completed at least four assignments.
As you have learnt in Tutorial 4, you can be asked to proofread a document in hard or soft (electronic) format. Microsoft (MS) Word is the most common word processing program, and this exercise is designed for you to practice MS Word and track changes.
Instructions – MS Word Exercise (pdf)
MS Word Exercise (docx)
MS Word Exercise – Corrected (pdf)
MS Word Exercise – Correction Report (pdf)
Tips for using Track Changes (pdf)Hi Dr Liza
In regards to track changes, once the document has been sent back to the client to look over, and they agree ( or disagree), is it them at their end or me at mine that would “accept” or “reject” the changes, in track changes tool bar once they have notified me what they would like done? Track changes is a great tool, but that little bit confuses me a little.
regards Kylie
I hope you don’t mind giving some feedback on a real-life experience with track changes.
I once proofread a book using track changes. When I emailed the proofread copy back to the customer, I asked her to go through the suggested changes and either accept or reject them. Little did I know that the customer was not actually using the ‘accept/reject’ option in MS Word; she was going through every single change and transferred them to her own copy. In the process new errors got introduced and vital changes were overlooked. I did another proofread, and another, and another, wondering why errors I knew I had fixed, kept turning up. Then, at some point, I mentioned my concern and that’s when I figured out that my customer was not using my file; she was transferring my suggested changes to her file.
Lesson learned. Communicate with your customer and make sure the process is understood. I have also learned that track changes can be messy and confusing for the customer. Minimal changes such as deleting a space still show up as a change, but it is not always clear for the customer what that change is. In my case, the customer just ignored the changes she didn’t notice or understand, resulting in a document that was still full of errors after a third proofread. I ended up proofreading that book six times!
Since that experience I send two files – one with track changes and one clean copy – and I explain the process.
We all learn from our mistakes!
Further to Katrien’s experience: even if people are using MS Word, the client and the proofreader can be using different versions of Track Changes so you have to make sure both you and the client are, if not using similar versions, aware of the differences. Some people will be using free software which, while generally compatible, may still need tweaking. The point about sending a clean copy and one showing your corrections is well made.
Thanks to both Katrien and Dick for your comments regarding sending both the Tracked Changes copy and the clean copy. I’ve just finished the course and have only marked up two manuscripts so far. For both of them I only sent the Tracked Changes copy, thinking it was up to the authors whether they wanted the changes I suggested or not. Fortunately, in both cases the authors were accomplished Word and TC users, but I will definitely bear in mind what you have both said for future work I undertake.
Hi Robyn,
If it was my tracked changes document that sent you into ‘mild hypertension’, I sincerely apologise. Especially as many of the marks were simply spacing ones. I have learnt two things from your story and from this post. One would be to make the spacing changes globally before opening the ‘track changes’ as the markings for removed spaces add no value whatsoever to the author and only serve to make the copy very messy. The other, and I will do this for you in future too, is to provide a clean ‘Final’ copy as well as the tracked changes one, as suggested earlier in this string of posts. I’m writing this here on the Student Forum, so we can share these lessons with other PAE students.
Warmest regards,
Kathy
Hi Kathy,
Lovely to hear from you and thanks for posting this on the main forum. Just to clarify, I was already familiar with tracked changes when I received your proofed copy of my short story, because I’d had some previous experience with an editorial project some time earlier. I knew exactly what I was looking at when I received your copy and I understood enough to know how to work through the changes one at a time and take care to avoid creating new mistakes.
Your suggestions are excellent ones and I think they’ll benefit everyone. This has been a really good topic and I’ve learned a great deal even though I’m not a PAE student.
Warm regards back to you too.
Robyn
I have just completed this exercise using “Writer” in the free software Libre Office. The proofreading tools are almost exactly the same as in MS Word, except for being located in a different menu. I noticed that in the corrected copy of the exercise where there is a misspelled word, for example “it’s” in the first line, the word is deleted but marked in red with a line through it, and the corrected word “its” inserted beside it.
Is this necessary? My understanding was that one simply corrected the word by deleting, changing or inserting the correct letter or punctuation. The deleted or incorrect letter is shown in red with a line through it and the correct letter beside it. So the correction is obvious without the insertion of the corrected word. Then if the proofreader deems it necessary a comment can be added for the correction.
I can’t comment directly on the “Writer” application Roger, but using Track Changes in Word you have the option of how you want the corrections to appear. If you select ‘in line’ then the corrections appear exactly as you’ve described. Alternatively you can have them showing in the side bars instead, with the correction simply appearing in it’s corrected form (but in red) in the body of the document. These changes will remain thus until someone accepts or rejects each change, thereby giving you a clean copy.
I hope this helps.
Kind regards,
Kathy
Agreed Tina, which is why it’s useful to read forum posts outside of our ‘own’ study areas. I’m fairly sure that I was advised to do that when I first enrolled.
I was very lucky with the two students whose work I proofread. One (Nikki) had already done the PAE course before the writing one and works in the field, whilst the other (Robyn) is a journalist, so both had worked extensively with Track Changes. But that may not be true for all your writing students. Perhaps it would be worth sending your students to this post which is fixed at the top of the PAE forum – or introduce that element into their study?
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.