Lauren Fine Suzy Bills ELang 350 March 21, 2013 Prompt 1 Rearranging Words I don’t want to be an editor. Maybe this is a little surprising for an editing minor to say, but I honestly don’t like editing. I don’t really care whether a mark is an en dash or an em dash. I’m OK with someone capitalizing secretary of state when it’s used as an appositive. I’m content to never know how to spell potpourri (this is what Google was invented for, people). I respect the profession and see its valuevalue it, but I just don’t want to be the one worryingworry about all of those details. I haven’t always felt this way, though. There was a time, several years ago, when I thought I wanted to be an editor. As a high school student, my vision of editing was sitting in a fluffy, red armchair with a manuscript in one hand and a pencil in the other, sipping on lemonade as I read fiction all day. As I got older, my career plans began to focus on teaching rather than editing, but I signed up for the editing minor anyway, knowing that the skills I would learn would help me with my own writing and provide a possible back-up career. Still, my view of editors remained somewhat idealized until this semester, when I actually started editing. My moment of epiphany happened earlier this semester on a Wednesday evening that seemed like any other. It was cloudy and cold, not exactly epiphany weather (gray skies generally make me want to think as little as possible, which leaves little room for self reflection). I trudged through the wind to my Insight magazine class, thinking about all of the work I needed
to do for the website and wondering whether the professors’ plans for our two-and-a-half-hour class period would leave much time for me to work on my own projects. But Cheri and Lisa, our professors, had another plan. Cheri walked in with a fragrant bag of chocolate-covered pomegranate seeds and a thick stack of papers. “Exciting news,” she said, passing around the candy. “The design team has finished some spreads for the next issue. We need three people to sign up for each article, and then we’ll spend the next couple hours editing.” I signed up for several articles I hadn’t read yet, and Cheri handed me a stack of spreads with a checklist and the explanation that the words were pretty much final at this point, so we were to focus on typographical errors only. Grabbing a handful of chocolates, I plunged green-pen first into a real-life editing experience. After about half an hour of this, I was ready to start scribbling on the page like an angry toddler. Not only was I sick of checking that every dash was an em dash and every acronym was in small caps, but I realized that checking every word so carefully kept me from really feeling the impact of the story. Sure, I knew what the article said, but I didn’t understand it on an emotional, human level. Plus, it took a lot of self-control to resist rearranging words and rephrasing paragraphs. Why would I care about commas when expansive would clearly be a better word than enormous? The whole process just didn’t gel with me. And the problem definitely isn’t that I don’t think editing matters. I believe in the power and importance of making writing error-free. Doing the style guide for ELang 350 confirmed to me just how important it is. As I went through New Global Citizens’ website looking for problems, I realized that some of the errors could make things a little confusing for an international audience. Consistency and correctness are important for clear communication. Plus, with each error I caught, I felt like their credibility as an organization went down a little bit. If
even an established, carefully crafted website that has been around for a while needs an editor’s eye, every organization clearly needs onethere are many others that do too. Editing is an important job; I just don’t want to do it. So what is it about my skills and personality that don’t quite align with the role of an editor? Well, first of all, I think that stamina is more of a problem than a skill. I think I could be a good editor if I had to. I can go through a document carefully. I have a good ear for the way things sound and look, I have a pretty good memory, and I am an expert at using the Internet to find answers to things I don’t know. I can be detail oriented; the problem is that I don’t like to. I’m a big-picture kind of thinker. When I read something, I read for overall effect. I read for the message and whether it expresses that message well. I read thinking about how they could improve their ideas, their organization, or their style. This means I tend to gloss over small errors in the interest of more substantive or developmental improvements. So why not be a substantive or developmental editor? In The Copyeditor’s Handbook, Marc Einsohn explains that substantive editors have license to rewrite a text, making “wholesale revisions,” and developmental editors reorganize and restructure a manuscript (11). It’s true, this type of editing would fit my skills and interests a little more, but it’s a little too impersonal for me, still. I don’t want to exchange revisions and edits with authors; I want to work side by side with them. I don’t want to fix people’s writing; I want to help them improve their writing. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I want to be a writing teacherteach writing. But even though I’m not planning on being an editor, the editing minor has been invaluable to me. Despite my recent realization that I don’t really like editing, I have learned so much by studying it. I’ve learned that language does (and should) change over time. I’ve learned that proper usage depends more on the situation and audience than on the established set of rules.
I’ve learned that language can be explained and categorized—it’s not the elusive art form some people think it is. I’ve learned to be more aware of the effect language has. It’s not just the words themselves that matter—the appearance and correctness of a text can influence a person’s perception just like the words can. Most importantly, I’ve learned to be more correct and precise in my own writing, and by extension, I’ve learned how to help others be more precise in theirs. I remember reading a student’s paper during my first semester as a writing fellow and realizing that, while their ideas were great, their sentence structure seemed a little odd. It almost felt like they were talking around an issue in order to sound more formal. Because of my training in the English and Editing programs, I quickly recognized that the student was using too much passive voice, thus giving her writing a somewhat convoluted feel. I made a comment on her paper about it, and when I asked her if she had questions about my comments in our conference later she said, “Yeah. You mention ‘to be verbs’ and ‘passive voice’ on here. What exactly is that?” Having been taught to look for “to be verbs” in my writing from high school on, it never occurred to me that someone might not know what that meant. I had never explained it to someone before, but thanks to my editing classes, I knew a lot about how passive voice worked, when it was appropriate or inappropriate, and how we could fix it. I briefly explained the concept, showed her a few examples, and talked about how to change specific sentences in her paper. After a couple minutes, she said, “Oh cool, that makes sense. I’ll change that,” and I was thrilled. It may sound cheesy, but I will probably never forget that experience because it confirmed to me what I had always hoped: I loved teaching. The career I had decided I wanted really was the one for me. I don’t want to be an editor, but I will always be grateful for the experience and
confidence the editing minor has given me. I may not like the idea of meticulously going through the punctuation and spelling in a document, but the skills I have gained through studying editing will still be useful throughout my career. What I have learned will always influence my own writing and the writing of those I will teach.
My Revision Checklist Need to add 3 more quotes from books Check for passive voice Make things more parallel when I can Make the conclusion less‌ stupid.