Two editors mark up the same paragraph. One draws a looping line through a clumsy clause; the other leaves a comment that reads “consider tightening.” Both are right, and neither can see the other’s work until someone opens the file at four in the afternoon and tries to merge two versions by hand. Most review chaos is not caused by bad writing. It is caused by unclear signals.

The fix is not complicated. Learn a dozen marks, agree on a few file habits before anyone starts typing, and write comments that tell a colleague exactly what to do next. That is what this guide covers.

Why the old marks still earn their keep

Proofreading symbols were designed for paper, and paper is where they shine. A mark in the margin is faster than typing a sentence, and it sits right next to the words it affects. On a printed page, symbols compress an entire conversation into a few pen strokes: delete this, close that gap, move this clause before that one.

Digital tools solve the visibility problem but create a new one. Every tracked insertion and comment looks equally important, so a reader has to work out which changes are structural, which are style, and which are simply a reviewer thinking out loud. Teams that still use a handful of conventional marks — even typed or drawn on a tablet — cut through that noise quickly. The marks also work as a shared shorthand in conversation: “I put a stet on that sentence” needs no explanation.

The marks worth knowing by heart

You do not need the full typographic set. These cover the vast majority of real corrections:

• Delete — a line through the text, with a small loop or tail in the margin.
• Insert — a caret (∧) where the new words go, with the text written above or in the margin.
• Close up — a pair of curves below the words to remove an unwanted space.
• Space — a single vertical stroke or a small “#”-style mark between characters that are too tight.
• Transpose — a curling line to swap two letters or words: teh becomes the.
• New paragraph — a pilcrow (¶) or a bent arrow between sentences.
• Run on — a curved line joining the end of one paragraph to the start of the next.
• Lower case — a slash through a capital letter; caps is usually shown with three short underlines.
• Stet — dots under the words plus “stet” in the margin, meaning “leave it as it was.”
• Query — a circled note or a question mark in the margin, meaning “author, please decide.”

Two rules make any marking system work. First, keep marks in the margin, aligned with the line they refer to. Second, write your initials next to anything that is a preference rather than a correction. A bare mark implies certainty; initials signal a conversation.

Set up the file before anyone types

Track changes is only as useful as its settings. Before the first edit, check that the reviewer name and initials are correct, because every insertion will carry them. Anonymous changes are almost impossible to resolve later, and a shared “Editor 2” account tells nobody anything.

Then decide what gets tracked. Formatting changes — a stray space, a font that flipped when text was pasted — can bury real edits under a fog of grey markup. Most word processors let you hide formatting from the display while still recording it, which keeps the page readable. Learn where the “show comments and insertions only” filter lives; it is the single most useful button in a long review.

Agree on one owner of the master file. Reviewers who edit in parallel produce two versions that must be reconciled by hand, and the person doing that reconciliation always misses something. Sequential edits, or one editor plus one commenter, are slower to organise and much faster to finish.

Comments people can actually act on

A comment that says “awkward” costs the next person five minutes of guessing. A comment that says “This sentence repeats the point above — delete from ‘which means’ to the end” costs nothing and resolves itself.

Where possible, propose the replacement wording inside the comment, or better still, make the edit with tracking on and use the comment only to explain why. If you are raising a question, make it a closed one: “Do we keep the British spelling here, or switch to US style?” gives someone a decision to make. “Check spelling?” does not.

One useful house rule: every comment should end with either a proposed edit or a question that has a yes-or-no answer.

A review protocol that holds up

The following sequence works for a two-person team and for a group of ten, provided everyone knows which step they are in:

1. Freeze the text. Name the file with a version and a date, and state clearly that no one edits anything except the copy in that file.
2. Assign roles. One structural reviewer looks at argument, order and completeness; one line-level reviewer handles grammar, consistency and punctuation. They do not work at the same time.
3. Separate substance from style. If both passes run together, the style edits hide the structural ones and the author cannot see the wood for the trees.
4. Resolve, don’t stack. The file owner works through comments in order, accepting, rejecting or replying to each one. Nothing is left open without a reply.
5. Accept everything, then read clean. Turn off the markup and read the document as the reader will. Track changes hides repetition and rhythm problems, because all that grey text breaks the flow.
6. Archive both versions. Keep the clean file and the marked-up file. The marked-up copy is the record of why decisions were made, and you will want it in three months.

When two reviewers disagree

Most conflicts are not about grammar; they are about taste, and taste needs a tiebreak. That is what a style sheet is for. Keep a short document listing the decisions your team has already made — spelling variant, serial comma, how you treat numbers, the capitalisation of job titles — and add to it every time you settle an argument. After a few projects, most disagreements resolve themselves before they start.

For anything the style sheet does not cover, use a simple decision rule and state it out loud: the author’s voice wins unless it breaks the style sheet or the grammar. That single sentence ends more circular email threads than any amount of mediation.

The five-minute handover check

Before a file leaves your hands, run this short check. It catches nearly every problem that turns a clean review into a second round.

• Every change carries initials, and no stray edits sit under a shared account.
• The view is filtered so comments and insertions are visible, with formatting hidden.
• No unresolved queries remain — every question mark has an answer or a decision.
• Any “stet” has been honoured, and the original wording is genuinely back in place.
• You have read the clean copy once, ideally aloud, before declaring it done.
• The file name carries a version number and a date, and the previous version is saved elsewhere.

None of this takes long. Five minutes at the handover saves an hour of reconciliation, and it keeps the review focused on the writing rather than on the plumbing.

Photo: Ron Lach / Pexels