A General Request
If you are a reviewer for a conference paper, and you are using MS Word's built-in commenting feature, please let your authors know that this is how you are submitting comments. Why, you might ask? Well, the document that you sent out in Word 2003 looking like this:
Appears on the screen of an author using Word 2000 like this:
Edits (as opposed to comments) appear on that Word 2000 screen, so it definitely appears that the reviewer did some editing. Resulting reaction: "Huh. I wonder what they meant by highlighting all that stuff in yellow? Oh well, I guess I'll just fix those grammar problems and call it a day." Given that some of the reviews consisted of half a dozen bullet points, it wasn't all that unreasonable of a reaction.
And it's really unfortunate when the author finds about this fact from his coauthor, after thinking he had completed the review process. On the afternoon before the deadline. And out of the three reviews submitted, this one was the most in-depth and detailed by a wide margin.
I'm not sure that my coworker has heard me yell "Awww, motherFUCKer!" in our business conversations before. In fact, I strongly doubt it.
Thus, the author just put in an unexpected
Yes, I could have displayed these comments in my current version of Word, simply by going into Tools -> Options -> Formatting Marks -> Hidden Text. Oh, how obvious!--I guess us technically clueless guys just have to muddle through.
Well, I think it's in the can now. And I have visitors coming to town! Jen, Delaney, Marilyn, Rebecca, and Jean--three generations of an extended family. Their relations are a complex and tangled web--I will probably provide a diagram to explain.
posted by Bats @ 12:15 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
diagram would be good. i never did figure it all out.
josakana
I ran into the "highlight phenomenon" on my last paper. My boss forwarded a reviewed copy with a few things highlit and some minor corrections, no big deal. But then I moused over the highlit part (thinking the same thing, "I wonder why...") and the comments appeared in a floating window. And there were many. And they were valid. And my boss was really confused why it took me two days to fix the manuscript when it only had a few little changes...
I wish you safe travels. And sleep.
Re diagram--we figured out yesterday that four of the five of the women there could be addressed as Ms. L____. Ack!
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