Glossary
The words that turn up when documents are marked up and passed back and forth, defined plainly — including the two or three where practice genuinely differs.
Most of these are everyday words in a document-heavy practice, and most of the time everyone means the same thing by them. The exceptions are worth knowing: whether a blackline is different from a redline, and what someone means by a conformed copy, depend on where they trained.
- Redline
- A version of a document showing what changed from an earlier one, with insertions and deletions marked in place.
- Blackline
- The same thing as a redline in most practice, with a different history and an occasional distinction attached to it.
- Tracked changes
- A word processor's recording of edits as they are made, attributed and reversible, which can be accepted or rejected one at a time.
- Clean copy
- A version with every change accepted and all markup removed, so it reads as a document rather than as a record of edits.
- Execution version
- The final, agreed text of a document, prepared for signature and not to be edited further.
- Conformed copy
- A copy of a signed document with the signatures represented in type rather than reproduced, so it can be circulated as a record of what was executed.
- A turn of the document
- One party's round of revisions, passed back to the other side — the unit in which a negotiated document actually moves.