Some MS Word housekeeping and tips

Viewing changes

You can control what changes you see. Under the Review tab, there's a dropdown menu; if you choose "All markup," all changes will show. If you choose "Simple markup," inline changes (insertions, deletions, moves, and formatting) will be hidden, but the comment bubbles will remain. If you choose "No markup," you'll see a completely clean copy of the document; the text will be the final version of my suggested edits to your manuscript, but it will look like a final copy. If you choose "Original markup," you'll see your original without my changes. (Switching back and forth between Original and other views will let you compare your original to my edited version.) 

Accepting/rejecting changes

You can go change by change if you like, but it's EXTREMELY tedious. (If you want to do this, there are buttons in the reviewing toolbar for you: next change and previous change to navigate through the document, and accept/reject change to act on each change as you come to it.

It's much more efficient to select a chunk of text where you want to accept/reject ALL the changes (a phrase or a sentence or a paragraph) and then click the "accept" (or "reject") button while the text is highlighted; that will accept/reject all the changes in only the selected text. 

To get rid of comments, you do have to go comment by comment, deleting each one; if you right-click the comment bubble, you can choose "delete" from the contextual menu that opens. Or you can send it to me when you're finished and I can delete them all at once with a macro.

"Asserting" versus "naming" and academic writing

In the following quote, Chatman is talking about how a novel's presentation of detail and description is always intentional and therefore presumed to be meaningful (it asserts detail); a film's presentation of detail and description seems much more incidental (it names detail). 

“When I say, “the cart was tiny; it came onto the bridge,” I am asserting that certain property of the part of being small in size and that certain relation of arriving at the bridge. However, when I say “the green cart came onto the bridge,” I am asserting nothing more than its arrival at the bridge; the greenness of the cart is not asserted but slipped in without syntactic fuss. It is only named. Textually, it emerges by the way. Now, most film narratives seem to be of the latter textual order: it requires special effort for films to assert the property or relation. The dominant mode is presentational, not assertive. A film doesn’t say, “This *is* the state of affairs,” it merely shows you that state of affairs.” (Chatman, "What novels can do that films can't, and vice versa," 128)

So many authors write as though they need to simply show a state of affairs, when they are really asserting (arguing for) that state of affairs; authors have lived with their own familiar ideas for so long that they take them as given, when they actually need to be proved. Conversely, authors also often assert things that can simply be presented, particularly when discussing moves in their larger argument that have already been well established by previous research.

A huge part of my task as a substantive editor is to figure out what the author wishes to "assert" and what she merely wishes to "name"—and to subordinate/highlight those accordingly by playing with syntax.

Oh my gosh, the Chronicle actually published a useful piece about dissertating

You can read it here.

Actual, practical advice about the process that many students don't know.

The most important ones:

1. It only counts if you've written it down.

2. Be ready to write a lot of stuff you'll throw away.

3. Your advisor is not thinking about you unless they are reading your work at that very moment.

Go forth and write things down to throw away! :)

Quick Tip: "elegant variation" wastes your readers' precious processing power

In the piece I'm editing right now, my client was talking in one sentence about a set of "frameworks," and then in the next sentence she referred to some "tools." It took me about two seconds of puzzling before I realized that "tools" was referring back to the frameworks.

In academic writing, it's usually best to just use the same word for a key concept over and over rather than substituting synonyms.

Although our elementary school teachers insisted that we shouldn't use repetitive vocabulary, that's not necessarily true in academic writing. When the ideas are highly complex, the language shouldn't be.

Every time your reader has to stop and puzzle over what you meant ("are tools the same thing as frameworks?"), she uses a little bit of cognitive energy that should have gone towards understanding your argument.

Clear as many roadblocks as you can for the reader so she can focus on the logic and support and stakes of your argument.