track changes

Here are a couple of posts for further reading, as well:

  • On Marking Text for Deletion. While this more specifically addresses one thing you might wish to do with tracking revisions, it’s worth noting that the Revisions feature devinganger notes above is compatible with striking out text. If you have a revision mode enabled, it will use that current colour for it, and will be included when walking through adjustments with the Find by Formatting tool.
  • Tracking edits in detail. In this post, I go into some of the techniques I use to track revisions at both the micro and macro scale, under the Keeping Track of Edits heading. It’s not all about fixing typos and poorly phrased sentences, but something we need to get a good sense of how the whole fits together and evolves through the revision process. Scrivener’s “big picture” philosophy of design grants it with some exceptional tools for tracking things at the larger scale.
  • Further Strategies for Revisions: This post is an earlier revision of the above, but it also goes over effective use of the Snapshots feature, which can be thought of as an alternative to active marking with Revisions. The two can be used together of course, as well, but with Snapshot comparisons, you can have the software track what has changed for you, and without having to remember to turn the modes on and off. It’s a different way of thinking about it, since word processors generally don’t grant you the ability to fork the text and then freely work on a chunk of it, and later reference previous states of that text with change markings. So it might feel a bit odd at first to be plunging into the text directly and making edits with no regard for tracking them—but it’s also a safe option to try out. If you don’t like how it goes, you can easily copy and paste the Comparison result into the editor to get a marked up copy. Give it a little test and see how it goes.

If you search the forum for “track changes”, you are likely to come across a number of threads where others have shared their techniques, as well.