How to redline a clause from an email
The small job that does not deserve a document workflow: two versions of a clause in an email thread, and a redline in your reply.
The situation
Someone has sent you a clause in the body of an email. Perhaps they wrote "we'd propose the following for clause 8" and pasted a paragraph; perhaps they quoted your wording back with changes. Either way there is no file, and the question you have is small: what exactly did they change?
Reading two paragraphs side by side to find the difference is famously unreliable. The eye skips, and the change that matters is often a single word — "may" for "shall", thirty days for forty-five, a "not" that was there before.
The steps
- Copy your version of the clause — from the earlier email in the thread, or from the draft you sent.
- Paste it into the Original pane.
- Copy their version out of the email and paste it into Revised.
- Read the redline, which appears as you paste.
Formatting comes across with the paste. Bold, italic and lists are preserved and compared, so a defined term that lost its emphasis shows up as a formatting change rather than disappearing silently.
Pasting it back
The Redline copy button puts the marked-up version on your clipboard as formatted text. Pasting it into a reply in Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail gives you the strike-through and underline, so the person reading your email sees what you saw.
The other three buttons cover the rest of what you might want:Revised for the clean text with the changes accepted, which is what goes back into the document; Markdown and Plain text for somewhere formatting will not survive, such as a chat message or a ticket.
Email clients vary in how much markup they honour, so the redline is written with several layers of it — a struck-through span inside two elements that mean the same thing — precisely so that something survives wherever it lands. It will not look identical everywhere. It will be legible everywhere.
Is it safe to paste a clause in?
It is a fair question to ask of any online tool, and the answer here is checkable rather than reassuring. The comparison runs in your browser: the text is never sent anywhere, because the page is served with a policy that forbids it from contacting any other origin. You can confirm that in your browser's developer tools in about thirty seconds.
The privacy page explains exactly what does and does not leave, including the analytics and the feedback form, which are the only two things that transmit anything at all. If you would rather test it than read about it,the checks are here — and they work on any tool, not just this one.
When not to do this
If what you actually have is two files, compare the files. A clause-level comparison cannot see that the clause was renumbered, that a definition changed three pages earlier, or that a schedule moved — and those are exactly the changes that get missed.Word's Compare is the tool for that, and it is a better tool for it than anything that works on pasted text.