Further to a comment in another section, about the way that WW makes it technically a bit awkward to deliver critiques, here is the method that I evolved to deal with that problem. It's much, much easier than printing out stories, making notes and then copy-typing a lot of stuff:


Copy the entire story to a WP document and save it. I just use the title of the story.

Save the document again under a different title. I use the title of the story with "Crit" at the end.

You now have two identical copies of the story.

Read the story.

Go to the version of the story that had "Crit" added to the title.

Start adding your comments to the story, deleting all the parts of the story that you are not going to comment on as you go. You will be left with only the bits that you want to quote - the great advantage of doing it this way is that there is no copy typing to do, and you will always quote absolutely accurately. If you put the html for the quotes boxes etc in a Word document and copy-past that to the site, it does come up OK as quotes boxes - I don't know if it works with other WP packages (I don't even type the quotes boxes html every time; I have it copied to start with and then just paste it and add a "quotes off" backstroke to the second box)

If you find that you want to go back and check something that you have now deleted, switch to the first copy of the story, which is still complete - I keep them both up on screen.

Much, much easier than the printing-out and typing-up method - but I'd be interested in any refinements to make it even easier!

<Added>

Oh, and lots of people don't like the way that WW destroys formatting in posted stories, and makes them look like big blocks of text. I have to say that it doesn't bother me - you can usually see where the paragraphs were supposed to be.

I know people don't like it, though, so when I post stories, I do a special WW version with white space put in in place of paragraph breaks. But if someone doesn't do this, if you used my method above, you could run down a story before you start on it and put in some spaces. Easy!

Catkin, that's brilliant.

I have a very similar and simple method for commenting on students' work in forums, if it's not something I need or want to go via Word for...

I just:

ctrl + A then ctrl + C (or the right-mouse-button equivalents) to copy their text,

ctrl + V to paste it into the comment window, and work my way through it like that, deleting anything I'm not commenting on directly.

If the site or my computer are being a bit flakey, every now and again I do ctrl + A, then ctrl + C while I'm working, just to save what I've done so far to the clipboard.

Thanks for posting this, Catkin. It's good to have a system.

Next time I post something, I'm going to try to get the formatting sorted out, including putting the italics in.