There’s a heat wave this week. I’m getting too old for those. My office is under the roof of this house, and it bakes. So I’d better keep this instalment short and take it mostly out of stock.
This is my instruction to authors, when it’s left up to me:
“Simply key your changes directly into the text with Track Changes running. They’ll appear in a different colour on our screen when we review your changes. There is no need for you to provide reasons for your changes. We will assume you have them and can always query you if necessary. The approach outlined here has two advantages. (1) The book is more likely to stay on schedule. (2) We’ll never have to guess what you want. The consequences of taking a different approach are the opposite of (1) and (2).”
(Authors love to hear/know that their book is on schedule.)
That’s it. I’ve seen some MEs go wild with their instructions, two or three pages single-spaced, which is an invitation for authors to ignore them completely. And actually, it doesn’t matter how authors go about their review, assuming that everyone is working in MS Word (basically everyone does). You can always find the changes an author made, no matter how they handled the mscript review. Step One: Make a copy of the file you sent the author, Label it CE ACCEPTED, and accept all changes. Step Two: make a copy of the file the author returned to you, label it AR ACCEPTED, and accept all changes. Step Three: Run Compare Changes, with the CE ACCEPTED file as the original and the AR ACCEPTED file as the revised file. The latter will show the changes the author made to the copy edit, which all you need to see. So it doesn’t matter how the author handled the review, or how badly, you can always see what he did to the CE.
ADDENDUM: I dread the Comment function in MS Word. Nothing good can come out of anyone using it. Very occasionally, for blanket instructions, such as “Change Dennison to Denison throughout,” it’s useful for flagging the CE to run a global search-and-replace. Beyond that, forheavensake authors, don’t do it. Key the changes straight into the text. We’ll always be able to see them.