[RSS] ProfHackerProfHacker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education / When Track Changes Isn’t Enough

When Track Changes Isn't Enough Prof. Hacker [This is a guest post by Deanna Kreisel, who is an associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. The author of Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot & Hardy (U of Toronto P, 2012), she is currently working on a project on sustainability and utopianism in the Victorian period.--@JBJ] I've been doing a lot of editing/commenting on electronic documents recently, and realized I've been trying something different. I thought others might be interested in it, and hoped that more experienced hands might well have further improvements. My usual editing/commenting practice has been to open the document immediately in Track Changes mode and start hacking away as I read. But that really only works with objects of a lower grade of complexity, like most undergraduate papers. I've been finding I get too bogged down in minutiae this way and can lose the thread of more tricky arguments. So I started doing this: converting the essay to a PDF and transferring it to my iPad for first reading. Then as I do the initial read-through, I highlight (thank you, Apple pencil!) the main points as I go — basically, the topic sentences. (This is literally an exercise I make my undergrads do.) I also mark up, on the iPad, only very high-level ideas/suggestions that jump out at me as I read the first time. I do all this in GoodReader, which has a FANTASTIC function that allows you to email to yourself, straight from the document, a summary which includes only the highlighted sentences. Then you have a skeletal outline to refer to as you dive in for the second read in Track Changes mode. Thus, when I read the document the second time I have in front of me: 1. The Track Changes version on my computer in which I am typing my comments and making changes/suggestions; 2. The skeletal outline, also on my computer, for reference; 3. On my iPad, the PDF version with my high-level scribbled ideas (and the highlighted main points) marked on the document. THIS HAS SAVED ME SO MUCH TIME, and helped me (I think) be a much better editor. It seems like an extra step, but it's worth it. Do you have any little workflow hacks for editing complex documents? Please share in comments! Photo "20180301-FS-LSC-1362″ by Flickr user U.S. Forest Service / Public Domain RSS to Email Formatted