My writing has been enriched by my friends in writing groups. I’m in three groups, and I think I see a trend toward electronic critiquing. Two of the groups use MeetUp, which allows us to post files in advance of a face-to-face meeting. The standard way of critiquing is to download and print the file, mark it up and review the markup at the meeting, then pass the marked-up copy to the author. The other option is to download the file, use Word’s review function to make notes and then send the file to the author after the face-to-face meeting.
I would be interested in how other writers view the process. For me, once the printing is done, hand notation is easiest. On the other hand, for one monthly meeting recently, I had to print 105 pages.
If you edit electronically and have tips on best practices, I’d love to hear them in the ‘Comments’ box. For instance, do you make changes directly in the text or limit your comments to notes in the margin?
I’m much more comfortable editing and critiquing on paper. However, in the MN Writer’s Guild meetup, I can end up with several dozen pages of paper to critique. So what I’m trying to do is open each passage in Word, use Word’s comment function to make comments in the margins, and then email the passage with my comments back to the user.