What did the revision actually change?

The revised opening is shorter. It gets to the station sooner, removes a page of weather and gives the narrator something to do. It has also lost the one sentence that made you want to write the story.

That does not mean the revision was a mistake. It means the two drafts contain different things worth keeping.

Comparing versions is useful when you stop treating it as a contest to choose a winner. The older draft may contain a stronger image; the current one may have a better shape. You want to understand the changes well enough to make the next decision.

Ask a question before reading the colours

A difference view marks added and removed text. On a heavily revised document, it can look impressively busy while explaining very little. Start with a question that matters to the piece.

For the station scene, ask whether the new opening makes the narrator’s problem clearer. Read the whole opening of each version, not just the highlighted phrases. A sentence that appears unchanged may mean something different after the paragraph around it has moved.

For a practical document, the question might be whether a commitment changed, an exception disappeared or a qualification became a promise. Replacing “we aim to respond within a week” with “we respond within a week” is a small textual edit and a substantial change in meaning.

This resembles checking a claim against its source: the important difference may sit in a modest word. A comparison helps locate it; context tells you what it does.

Recover the part you need

If the older draft contains one useful paragraph, you may only need that paragraph. Restoring the entire old document would also bring back all the weaknesses you have since addressed.

Read the passage with its neighbours before copying it. The memorable sentence may depend on a detail introduced earlier, or duplicate something the new opening handles better. Recovering writing is an editorial decision, not just a retrieval operation.

If you want to explore the older version more broadly, make a separate document with a meaningful name. Reading the two drafts together can help you combine them, provided you remain clear about which is the working version. Ten files called variations of final are not a versioning strategy so much as a suspense plot.

Give important versions a reason

“Before cutting the station scene” is a useful version name because it records an intention. “Draft 7” records a position in a sequence. Both can be useful, but the first makes a future comparison easier to choose.

Clarity’s History compares captured Markdown versions and lets you save an older version as a new document. Restoring a version preserves the current captured contents in History before replacing the working file. History is local to the Mac; automatic versions have limited retention, while versions you save or name are protected from automatic cleanup.

The comparison covers text, including link and image addresses. It does not compare or preserve earlier image pixels. If the scene includes a photograph for reference, keep its files backed up separately.

For the next revision, keep a short note about what you are trying to improve. After editing, use that note as the comparison question. “Is the narrator’s reason for leaving clear by the end of the first page?” gives you something more useful to judge than whether the new draft contains fewer words.