Re: Revision bars

[John Gear <catalyst -at- PACIFIER -dot- COM>]

>     Frankly, I find them damn near useless for most
>     editing I do. If I used revision bars, each page would have a thin red
>     vertical line running down the left margin and sometimes even down the
>     right margin too! <grin>

Here, here!  After years with government agencies (both military and
militaristic-- Navy and DOE) I began to question the whole practice of
change bars.  It was as if I had questioned the Trinity or something--people
were aghast when I suggested we *think* about why we used them and how.
Very weird--I got more flak for it than if I had suggested putting odd
numbered pages on the left! ;^)

After studying things a while longer I found

 1.  Reviewers like and need them--which makes a bit of sense.  The change
bars are very useful for reviewers who like to be able to see quickly what's
changed since "last time" (either previous draft or published version).

But even then, change "bars" (in the margin) were pretty worthless, since
even a one-character change in the line results in a change bar being
added--unless the change is a deletion, in which case no bar in the margin!

So we adopted this convention:  For additions, we used an alternate form of
change markings, which WordAdequate calls "printer dependent"; it's
basically a light screen (grey) behind the changed text.  Makes the changed
text jump right out at you, even if it's only one letter (adding an s for
example).  For deletions we used "strikeout," which prints the deleted text
but with a line of dashes printed over it.

The drafts often look like hell--but then, reviewers can always find exactly
what they need to look at.

 2.  Most readers couldn't care less about revision/change markings at all.
More than a few had no idea what they represented--and still didn't care.

 3.  Change bars invite readers to skip other text, which can be disastrous
with procedures and not helpful with other kinds of work either.

 4.  Change bars don't discriminate between trivial changes and meaningful
ones--this tends to mean that if someone *does* know what the change bar
means and wants to figure out what changed, they waste a lot of time finding
that you changed the title of the Third Assistant Junior Soda Machine
Officer to Deputy Assistant to the Secretary for Carbonated Beverages.

And if you *do* try to sort the trivial from the significant by allowing
yourself the latitude not to mark "editorial" changes you get into a mess
when someone disagrees with your interpretation of what is/isn't an
editorial change vs. a substantive change.

 5.  Many managers who insist that "their people" needed change bars were
actually just projecting--*they* wanted them so they could skim over
something without reading it and be able to sound as if they'd read it.

So, after all that, the best result I was able to come up with was, for
especially sensitive or political procedures (contested), to publish an
advance copy "For Training Use Only" with all the junk markings (change
bars, etc.) and then, before the effective date, to send out the real, clean
procedure without all the distractions.  And just do away with change
markings everywhere else.  Keep a history file for the writer/subject expert
with all the gory details.

This had other advantages as well as far as acceptance of the procedure
goes.  And, more than once, it allowed us to cancel hosed-up procedures
before they were effective, saving us lots of hassle and probably some
incident reports.

[It seems that many reviewers only get motivated to review something closely
*after* it's approved.  By distributing training (advance) copies, we
created a window in which people actually looked carefully at the procedure
and gave us comments.  (I know what you're thinking--isn't that what the
review period was for?? Well, yes, supposedly.)
So a change that began with a quest to eliminate change bars had a very good
unintended result.]

So that's what I recommend people do with change bars--eliminate them in
official, published work entirely.  Use them for internal reviews and
training copies only.

Needless to say (so why am I saying it you ask?) YMMV.



John Gear (catalyst -at- pacifier -dot- com)

"If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no
hope.  If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are
opportunities to change things--there's a chance you may contribute to
making a better world.  That's your choice."                   -- Noam Chomsky