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Subject:Re: Comparing versions From:"David L. Bergart" <bodafu -at- CCVAX -dot- SINICA -dot- EDU -dot- TW> Date:Tue, 17 May 1994 14:15:50 +0800
In article <ab555 -at- freenet -dot- carleton -dot- ca> writes:
>I tried the compare documents (revisions) in MSWord, and I found it does
>indeed show the changes, but if you have made a lot of changes in one
>paragraph it strikes out the whole paragraph, instead of just the words you
>have changed.
---snip---
>I find that engineers are very fond of writing long clusters of nouns.
>What do you generally do with them?
Hi Margaret
I generally tell them to stop. Oh! You mean the clusters, not the engineers.
Ah! Well...theoretically it is not good English to build long noun modifier
strings, but it is so common that they cause little, if any, confusion for
most technical readers. Any way you could rephrase would be wordier and
less clear -- really, they *do* comprehend it. But I *don't* give them a
bunny rabbit sticker at the top of the page; I have my limits!
Rather than use 'compare documents', use revision marking while you write. In
Word 6 you can have it record the revisions, but not display the marking-up
while you edit. This way you can edit a clean page, while still being able to
check the original wording at the cost of a few button clicks (or one if you
write a macro). The authors can, if they are also using Word, view the paper
with and without revision marking. In Word 2 the option to not display the
revisions was not available, so I got out of the habit of using revision
marking. Now that I have version 6, I have gone back to using it.
David
____________________________________________________________________________
David L. Bergart bodafu -at- ccvax -dot- sinica -dot- edu -dot- tw bodafu -at- TWNAS886 -dot- bitnet
Copy editor Botanical Bulletin of Academia Sinica, Taiwan
____________________________________________________________________________
"Trouble with grammar have I, yes!" - Yoda
