Annotate your stories quickly and easily
A great tip if you hate going through your stories and marking them up for magazines’ factcheckers: annotate as you write your story. All you need is a word processing software program that has a footnote function. Here’s what you do:
Open a document and start writing. Every time you write something a factchecker will question, like a quote or a stat, use the footnote function to drop in your source’s contact info (“interview on 9/16/08 with John Smith, jsmith@email.com/212-555-5555″) or where you got the information (“from The Food Lover’s Companion 5th edition, pg. 100″ or “from http://www.usda.gov/foodsafetytips”).
As you edit and revise the doc, you can delete footnotes and, of course, add them. Save this document so that it’s clear this is annotated copy. For example, I’m writing an article right now for a food magazine, so I’ll save my doc as “CE annotated food safety article Burrell.doc”.
When you’re ready to send copy to your editor, make another copy of your annotated file and save it undera different name. Mine, for the article above, might be “CE food safety article Burrell.doc”. Open up the file, and use the find and replace function in the software. In MS Word, you have to click on the arrow button next to “Replace All” — that’ll pull down another menu. At the very bottom, under “Find,” click on “Special” and select “Footnote marks.” Leave the “Replace with …” dialogue box blank. Then hit the “Replace All” button and voila, all your footnotes are gone. If you have to do a rewrite or make edits, no problem — make the changes to your factchecking document, and repeat the process above. [db]
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Sep 18, 2008 Writing
Wow — I love this idea! I’m just finishing revisions on a book — how I wish I’d known about this technique while I was writing it! I’m definitely going to use this technique for my next story.
Elaine
I do my own sort of annotating/footnote combo, but this would be so much easier. Do you use doc or docx to save your files in? So do you send both your annotated and regular document when you submit your work?
Another trick I often use is to insert comments for editors/fact checkers/etc. in [] brackets in my article. (These are a bit more visible than footnotes. This is especially useful for me because I’m also a photographer, and I do a fair number of articles where I include my own photos. Here’s one recent example from a profile I did of a Denver-based photographer for a trade magazine:
“Or consider a seemingly simple ambient-lit portrait of a business executive sitting by a window on a train. [ED: This is image 01557.jpg] The clean warm tones of the photo belie the degree of production that went into the shot. ‘The day the rail car was available to me, the weather was threatening rain,’ he explained. ‘With dark clouds in the sky, I sprayed down the window with water and used a flash with a CTO filter to simulate breaking sunlight.’ [FC: DT interview #2 03/28/08, p.5, transcript enclosed]”
Of course, you’ll have to make sure you let your editor and fact checker know to expect these comments so they don’t accidentally make it into print, but I’ve not found this to be a huge problem, and the editors I work with have managed to deal with the inline comments without issue.
Brilliant! Wish I had known of this in grad school, too! Thanks!
KJG, I’m not sure what you mean by “doc or docx” — is that a Windows thing? I save both the factchecking file and the article file with the .doc extension in Word for Mac. And sometimes I send the annotated doc with my article, but usually not — there are usually a few edits, so it makes sense to wait.
Diana, I used the footnote function for the first time based on your suggestion, for a big project I’m working on for Health. It was so fun and easy to use, and now I have a perfectly annotated manuscript.