How to redline a clause from an email

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?

Or the change is yours. You have reworded a clause, or written up what a colleague in sales, procurement or IT asked for, and you need the people who will approve it to see exactly what you are proposing — not a paragraph they have to read twice against one they half-remember. That is the same job in the other direction, and it is as often a Teams message or an internal thread as it is a reply to the other side.

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

1. Put the version everyone has now into the Original pane — from the earlier email in the thread, from the draft you sent, or from the document itself.
2. Put the other version into Revised: the one that came back, if the change is theirs. If the change is yours, type it there — the pane is an editor, the redline updates as you write, and you can keep adjusting the wording until it says what you meant.
3. Read the redline, which appears as you go.

Anything you paste keeps its formatting. 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

Copy, in the Redline pane head, opens a short list of formats, and Redline is the one for an email: the marked-up version as formatted text. Pasting it into a reply in Outlook, Gmail or Apple Mail — or into a Teams message, where the same clause is as often circulated for comment — gives you the strike-through and underline, so whoever reads it sees what you saw.

The rest of the list covers where else a redline goes. Revised is the clean text with every change accepted, which is what goes back into the document, and Plain text is for somewhere formatting will not survive, such as a chat message or a ticket. Tracked changes is the one to leave alone here: Word turns it into real revisions, and Outlook hides them, so an emailed copy arrives reading as though nothing had been marked at all. Using Redline Pad sets out all four and where each one belongs.

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, and the text is never sent anywhere: the page is served with a policy that forbids it from submitting a form at all, and that names the only two origins it may contact — this site and an analytics host. You can confirm both in your browser's developer tools in about thirty seconds.

The privacy page explains exactly what does and does not leave, including the analytics, the feedback form and the desktop waiting list, which are the only three 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.