There is a moment in every long edit when the page fills with red and blue and you stop editing and start scrolling through other people's arguments with themselves. One paragraph carries four deletions, two insertions, a stray formatting change and a comment that reads, simply, "see above".

None of that is Track Changes' fault. It is what happens when you open a document without deciding what you are there to do. The tool is a recorder; the mess is a process problem, and a process can be fixed. Here is one that holds up on a 90,000-word manuscript as well as it does on a two-page memo.

Decide what kind of edit you are doing

Track Changes records everything with equal weight, which is exactly why you have to give the work a hierarchy. A structural edit — moving sections, cutting whole pages, questioning the argument — needs a handful of dense, considered comments. A proofread needs almost no comments and a great many small corrections. Attempt both at once and the author cannot see the wood for the trees: your note about the missing conclusion is buried under sixty commas.

Before you begin, settle two questions. What am I authorised to change directly, and what am I asking about? If the author has asked for a thorough edit and trusts you, make the changes and let them be reviewed in the markup. If the piece is co-written, or the author is protective of their phrasing, comment instead of rewriting. Guessing wrong here causes more friction than any misplaced apostrophe.

Set the document up before you touch a word

• Save a working copy and name it properly: Report_edit_initials_date.docx. Never edit the only version, and never edit a file whose name does not tell you what it is.
• Turn Track Changes on before the first keystroke. In Word that is the Review tab, or Ctrl+Shift+E. Anything you type with it switched off is invisible to the author and impossible to defend later.
• Check your user name and initials in the application settings. Otherwise every change is attributed to "Author", and a three-person review becomes anonymous.
• Switch off the auto-formatting that fights you. Smart quotes, automatic bulleted lists and automatic capitalisation all fire mid-edit and register as changes nobody asked for.
• Decide whether formatting is tracked. If your job is words, switch Track formatting off so pasted text does not arrive as a paragraph-sized deletion followed by an insertion.

Tame the display so you can read the page

Working in All Markup all day is like proofreading through a stained window. Use the display options deliberately instead.

• Simple Markup gives you a clean page with a margin line where changes sit. Good for a first read.
• All Markup with balloons (Show Markup, then Balloons, then "Show Only Comments and Formatting in Balloons") keeps the prose intact and pushes discussion into the margin, where it belongs. This is the setting to live in on long documents.
• No Markup shows the document as it would read if every change were accepted. Read the whole piece this way before you comment, or you will critique paragraphs you have already fixed.

The Reviewing Pane is worth opening, too. It lists every comment in order, which is how you spot five notes making the same point in five different places.

Write comments that survive a second reading

A comment is a message to a tired person who will read it three days from now. Two habits make the difference.

Say what to do, not just what is wrong

"Awkward" tells the author nothing they can act on. Name the problem and suggest a route out of it.

The second paragraph repeats the point made on page four, and the example is doing more work than the explanation. I would cut the paragraph and fold its last sentence into the one above — unless there is a reason the example needs to stand alone?

That is longer, and it is worth it. Note the question at the end: it leaves the author room to say no without feeling overruled.

One comment, one issue

If a paragraph has a structural problem and two clumsy sentences, write one comment about the structure and either fix the sentences quietly or leave them. Bundled comments get answered in bundles, and half of them get lost. Use the reply function for back-and-forth rather than starting a second comment two lines down. And quote the phrase you are talking about — "see above" is useless once the document has been scrolled.

Work in passes, not in a panic

The temptation with a long document is to fix as you go, accepting and rejecting in whatever order the changes happen to appear. Resist it. Three passes will do.

1. Read only. Markup hidden, no edits. You are checking whether the thing works as a whole. Note the five biggest issues.
2. Edit. Track Changes on. Deal with the big issues first, in document order, and jump between changes using Next Change or Ctrl+Page Down rather than hunting with the mouse.
3. Process the markup. Accept your own uncontroversial

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