Copy Editing Wk 1

It's strange to be reading texts on a forced schedule though the amount of reading and work is certainly manageable (especially compared to Mike's workload at Duke). I read two chapters in our actual textbook. The first was about the process a story in a newspaper goes through, from conception of the idea to actual printing. The second chapter was a killer review of things like verb tense, modifiers, pronouns, adverbs... I marked it more as a reference because I think trying to memorize all of that would be an exercise in futility.

This course is based on the AP Stylebook so part of our assignment was to "read" the Stylebook entries A-H. For those of you unfamiliar, this book is like a dictionary of commonly misspelled or misused terms, an authority on things like hyphens and capilization (for example, it is Web site, not website), and a basic reference on subjects like countries, courtesy titles, currency issues, and weather terms. I took some notes on things that seemed most common or most confusing to me but again, it didn't seem prudent to actually memorize the "dictionary".

Finally, our homework. This was frustrating to me. We were given roughly a dozen sentences with the instruction to correct them using the Stylebook, dictionary, and common sense. Some were obvious. Some, I was clueless. Mostly, I was unsure how much editing we should be doing. I've always been under the impression that editing should be a very "light" process, leaving the integrity of the author's work alone as much as possible. Turns out editing can be pretty harsh and over-bearing. In the end, I under-edited several sentences, resulting in a B+. So disappointed.

This week's assignments hinge primarily on fact-checking. We even have a current events quiz! But I'll report more on that in a few days.

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