I spend much of my time at work writing and editing technical engineering documents, policies and procedures. This task is made easier by the microsoft 'track changes function'. Yet on this site I find editing / commenting to be extremely time consuming. Surely writewords, as a service provider for professional and budding writers, could come up with something better than the 'quotation' process that currently exists?

This isn't a compliant, just a suggestion.

No that's not right, it is a complaint. To make it a suggestion I'd need to offer a proposal... what about using the microsoft word package?
Any views?
Michael

I'd say keep it simple, as it is now. It's currently application (e.g. Word, etc.) neutral and therefore accessible to everybody.

Also the mind boggles at the prospect of conglomerating all the comments and suggestions of different readers in one place. OK for a team working on a technical document but not on a chunk of fiction for people coming from various different directions.

Chris

I take your point about the WW tool being clunky compared to some of the newer tools, but the websites I've seen that use Word attachments are not so hot - it means an awful lot of uploading, downloading, saving and editing to access / give crits. TBH, I was put off critting at those sites because of it. By contrast, WW is sleek and efficient.

What would be nice is an in-browser review function and there is a frankly incredible example of one at Scribophile. That said, it must have been a Leviathan development effort and it is still buggy (or was when I was last there - culture at WW remains second to none, so I didn't loiter).

However, part of me really likes the way the comment tool is so simple and works everywhere, on everything. (Even when critting on a phone.)

I wouldn't like a word-type editing function because I don't think the role of sites like this should be to edit. I think people would be seduced into giving line-by-line rewrites, and actually, for me, that's the least helpful way of critting.

I find it almost useless when someone takes a chunk of text and rewrites it according to their lights - I know they're usually doing it because they've identified a real problem, but actually it ends up as just an exercise in altering one voice to another voice. What I prefer is when people just identify the problem and leave the solution up to the writer.

What might be useful would be a comment function - a way of putting a little flag on a page to say "this bit I didn't get" or "this bit was brilliant". But as Chris says, the accumulation of a whole pile of these would make the document quite knotty, and in fact I think the quote function works just fine for this purpose. It's a bit more longwinded to execute, but it's easy to read.

Also on a practical note, anything involving downloading the text makes plagiarism more easy, and might put off new members worried about this?

Perhaps 'proof-reading' would've been a better description, than 'editing'. The group in which I am involved has agreed to undertake a detailed review of each other's novel, and the 'edit' won't be about re-writing, nor voice-adding, nor an conglomeration of different people's comments, rather it will be a simple flagging up of (1) blatant errors, (2) inconsistencies (3) flow restricters, (cluckiness), (4) unnecessary repeats and so on... As you say, identifying the problems, which, with a major piece of work, is not practicable using the current tools.

Yes - I hear you, we can easily do this outside of the site.

Michael