IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication Dec 2025

Introducing TrackEDT: A Tool to Accelerate Empirical Editing Research

Jordan Smith University of Northern Colorado ; Matthew J. Baker ; Lauryn Wilde Brigham Young University ; Scout McMillan

Abstract

Introduction: The technical editing discipline stands in need of additional empirical research—particularly language-level research. However, the time- and resource-intensive nature of data collection and analysis may prevent some scholars from completing the needed research. Therefore, this tutorial introduces TrackEDT, a tool we have developed to ease the process of collecting and analyzing edits and comments from edited documents. Key concepts: TrackEDT extracts editors’ tracked insertions, deletions, moves, and comments from Microsoft (MS) Word documents—all elements of traditional editorial markup. It outputs the extracted data into an MS Excel format that affords easier analysis of the editors’ data than would be possible in the data’s original MS Word format. Key lessons: Researchers can download TrackEDT as an executable file at editingresearch.byu.edu/trackedt. To run the file, they select a folder containing edited MS Word documents that have tracked changes and comments. After TrackEDT processes the documents, the researchers can analyze the extracted tracked changes, comments, and metadata in the resulting Excel reports, which include information such as who made the edit, what type of edit was made, when the edit was made, how long the edit was, and what comments were appended. Implications for practice: Technical editing researchers can use TrackEDT and its reports to ease their collection and analysis of editing data, thereby answering important empirical research questions related to language-level editorial changes and processes.

Journal
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Published
2025-12-01
DOI
10.1109/tpc.2025.3615256
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
empirical research
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