Highlighting text in drafts
β’ 136 words β’ 1 min
When editing complex documents that warrant multiple revisions (iterations) and peer reviews, it is often helpful to make prominent distinctions within sentences, in order to track authorship and readiness.
I enjoy making such distinctions by using the color highlighting1 feature of the document / text app at hand (e.g. Google Docs, LibreOffice). Light colors are visually the best, and they are less distracting.
Authorship (or provenance) tracks who wrote what. Different people should have distinct colors assigned to each.
Readiness correlates to the number of revisions a given word or sentence has undergone through. For example, use yellow for early drafts and shallow brainstorming, orange for work-in-progress, and green for final revisions.
It is much easier to visually keep track of the document evolution when doing so.
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In some situations, bolding or underlining is also helpful. ↩︎