Tracking Changes

The first question I ask any client is the same: “Would you like me to use Track Changes, or just make the changes without tracking?” So far, one client has asked me not to use it. Most people want to see all the work I’ve done, and to be honest, I want to see it, too. It’s a lot easier for me to keep track.

Track Changes is a Word function. If used, backspacing, the letters you backspace will still appear, but turn red and have a line scored across them. if you add anything, it will also be red and underlined. You can also use an “Accept all changes” function, which will automatically make all the corrections, deleting the words and punctuation crossed out and leaving the corrections to look like the rest of the text. Track Changes allows me to see what I’ve corrected, and it proves the work I’ve put into the document for my client. All of it says to the client “Here’s all the changes I made”.

Of course, Track Changes isn’t a magic fix to see every mistake. The work is still there. But it really makes me feel like my clients can look at my work and see that I have put in the work for them.

Spellcheck Your Spellchecks!

One of the worst ever problems with spellcheck on computers is that it often doesn’t catch the errors it needs to, or catches errors that aren’t even errors. This is what often kills your writing. Your spelling is correct, in the eyes of Spellcheck. Or you made up a word, and Spellcheck doesn’t know the word yet. But the most fatal and hardest to catch of any errors is the word spelled right – except that wasn’t the word you wanted.

This is an easy mistake to make. There’s a lot of words in the world and it’s so easy to write the wrong one. The homonym is often the culprit (even I almost wrote “right” instead of “write” just now), but even more maddening, and often harder to catch, is the typo. You accidentally put two letters the wrong way around. Okay, fine, Spellcheck should notice that. Except it creates a different word, and Spellcheck doesn’t know that’s not the word you wanted. How is it to know you wanted to talk about what you mean, not someone’s mane?

The biggest example, by far, appears to be when people write “form”, meaning “from”. Yes, they’re both real words, but you want a preposition describing a place where an object or person started out, not a noun asking you to fill in your name and address. This is a mistake I’ve made and caught too late, and I’ve seen it cropping up in PhDs, high school essays and even published magazine columns and books. Everyone does it and no one points it out.

Well, it’s time to start pointing it out. The typo that Spellcheck never notices can kill your work dead. Don’t let that happen!