Suzy Bills ELANG 350 May 18, 2017 Editing Masters It all started in high school when my best friend Madison handed me a heavy white binder. “Here is my book.,” Madison’s eyes bored into mine so I could feel her intensity. “It’s 150 pages right now, and I need a few people to look over it before I send
Commented [NT1]: I love that you’re starting with a story! It makes me hate my own personal response paper, though… haha.
it to a publishing agent.” We were both juniors in high school, but I had always felt inferior to Madison, the registered genius, but. I was pleased that she wanted me to look over her newborn manuscript and offer suggestions for storylines and content. Neither of us knew how much I would find to correct in her book beyond plots and character development. By the time I was done, all 150 pages were covered in marginalia, deleted paragraphs, inserted commas, and capitalization underlines. I smugly handed the white binder back to her a month later, relishing the fact that I had caught the mistakes of a genius. I was so proud of myself. I felt like an editing master., I was so proud of myself. Madison and I were both avid readers, which is one of the reasons we had become best friends in grade school. By high school, though, Madison and I wereas playing the oneupmanship game with me of who had read the thickest book over the summer. I was
Commented [NT2]: This sentence does not seem to fit here. I don’t actually think it’s important to the story either, so I would suggest deleting it.
impressed by her creative writing abilities because I struggled to world build on my own. When I presented Madison with her substantive and copyedited manuscript, it was delightful to feel like I was better at something than Madison was: grammar. The agent never found a publisher for Madison’s book, and I wondered if it was my fault for suggesting too many changes and questioning the threads I thought were incongruous with the rest of the story. Maybe editing wasn’t right for me. I do know that
Commented [NT3]: This paragraph feels out of place to me. The first sentence fits well, but the paragraph seems to jump after that. Everything after “I felt like an editing master” feels redundant to me. The idea of her being smarter or more impressive in your eyes is already presented in the first paragraph, and the last sentence sounds basically like a repetition of the last sentence of the first paragraph.
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Madison’s “ugly newborn” manuscript was “the product of [her] labor and sweat, hopes and dreams,” and that it was a privilege for me to work on (Einsohn 45). I enjoyed feeling like an editing ninja, but I didn’t want to rip another work apart and have it fail the publishing gauntlet. Thinking that English majors must spend a lot of time learning principles of grammar, I declared an English major. Literature classes formed the bulk of my requirements, and the optional editing classes never fit into my busy schedule. I had
Commented [NT4]: You weren’t being asked to rip another work apart at this moment, so this doesn’t entirely make sense. I would suggest adding a short sentence before this sentence about being unsure about editing in the future. I added one just so you can see what I mean, but you definitely don’t have to use it. It’s just an example. Commented [NT5]: You never make the transition between high school and college. Consider adding a sentence at the beginning of this paragraph that shows us you’re talking about college now.
heard of the editing minor, but it seemed ridiculous that an English major should have to minor in editing separately. Why wasn’t I learning more grammar principles and copyediting skills in my literature classes? I knew some rules, but sometimes I was “dogged by indecision or confusion over rules of style and grammar”; other times, I “agoniz[ed] over when or whether to apply them” (Saller xv). When I was accepted into an English master’s program, I thought, “Here’s where I actually learn all the English rules. Here’s where I’ll become a polished writer and a scrutinizing but helpful editor.” I was wrong. Even though more writing is required of me, my coursework is still literature-heavy. I am expected to discuss Agamben’s theories of time and Walter Benjamin’s prescriptions for storytellers, “organiz[ing] complex ideas coherently” on paper (Williams 3). Not only that, but I want to “assert a style of [my] own” (Williams 25) in my writing, adding my personal voice like hot fudge, brownie bits, and maraschino cherries on top of a clearly mint banana split. I do learn quite a bit about writing in my graduate classes, but usually the learning painfully happens after I have made the egregious errors. For example, I did not know what a “hanging indent” for a works cited page was, much less how to create one. I knew
Commented [NT6]: I like the quote you chose here. It sounds nice. (: Commented [NT7]: Again, I’d like a transition from undergrad to grad before this sentence. For example, “After receiving a bachelor’s degree in English, I decided to apply to an English master’s program. After getting accepted, I thought…” and then continue with what you’ve already written.
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what a hanging indent was supposed to look like from the many scholarly journals I hadhave read, so I did my best with the Ttab key and spaces to copy the formatting. One of my professors marked all of my papers down for works cited formatting, until she finally wrote in the margins of my last paper, “Create a hanging indent in the tool bar.” I felt like a moron, but I was never taught any Word formatting skills for a works cited page until then. I wondered if there were other tips and tricks that I was missing from my English education that might have saved me some graduate school embarrassment.
Commented [NT8]: I haven’t learned Word formatting skills in my editing classes so far, so I’m having a little bit of trouble seeing how this experience connects.
As part of the master’s program I began teaching a freshman writing course. My instructions were to unteach the fake rules and teach the students to write better than before. The students peppered me with questions about grammar, all earseager to disprove recent high school English teachers. More often than not I admitted that I didn’t
Commented [NT9]: I’d like an example or two here, like ending sentences with prepositions and splitting infinitives, if that’s what you mean. Commented [NT10]: I would suggest using a stronger word here because you make it sound like the students are really eager to know these things. You could use “bombarded” or something of the sort.
know all the answers to their questions. I knew these students were wondering, like I didhad, how to make their writing stand gloriously out while keeping all the rules of English. The students’ entire academic writing careers hadve been dictated by red ink crossing out sentences beginning “with and or ending […] with up” (Williams 13), but I wasn’t sure which ones to keep and which ones to throw out from my own training. “Don’t take my word for it: Look it up,” I said to sidestep the questions. I took my own advice and started looking things up—and wondered if there was an easier way to become a better English teacher, become a better writer, and maybe even return to my high school dream of becoming an editor. “You should take an editing class.,” Emily stared into her computer camera so that I couldn’t mistake her grinning at me through the video call. She and her husband were in China for a flagship program, and Emily was working on her English Language
Commented [NT11]: This sentence is not parallel, and it throws me off a bit as a reader. With the “become” that I added, I think it works grammatically.
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master’s overseas. Though she hadn’t minored in editing, Emily had taken some classes and loved working on student journals. “I bet you’ll learn all things English and grammar that you’ve been wondering about.” She recommended starting that I start with a copyediting class if I could get permission to be in it as a master’s student. So that is exactly what I did.it is that months later, here I am taking an editing class for a spring term. As soon as other graduate instructors found out I was in an editing class, they started popping off their own sweated-over English questions. “You’re in an editing class? Do you know if the dash can follow a parenthesis? If so, are there any spaces between the dash and the parenthesis?” “Maybe you haven’t learned this yet, but do you know if you capitalize prepositions in titles? Sometimes I see it and sometimes I don’t. . . .” Questions I thought surely everyone in an English master’s program must have already figured out. Until that point, I thought I was alone in my stupidity. Most graduate instructors, like me, are wondering how to retrain their students to think about their reader’s reaction to their writing. Many students drown their work in tasteless academese because that is what they see modeled for them. A copyediting class like ELANG 350 should be required for English graduate students so that they can recall what the “real” rules of English are and better teach their students. We graduate instructors know a lot about writing because all the literature courses we take deluges us in works from the great writing masters. We know how to define a rhetorical situation and tell our bright-eyed freshmen that their writing depends on the style, not just the audience. But sometimes we bloody a piece with the red ink because we are just not sure where the commas should go to help the emerging writers make their work clearer—and
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we acknowledge it. English master’s students would appreciate having access to editing minor classes so that they don’t have to worry about quashing the work of a genius.
Works Cited Einsohn, Amy. The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Publishing and Corporate Communications. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. Print. Saller, Carol Fisher. The Subversive Copy Editor. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Print. Williams, Joseph M. Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 11th ed. Boston, MA: University of Chicago, 2014. Print.
Commented [NT12]: I love how much personality your writing has! This is great and you clearly put a lot of thought into it. My biggest suggestion would be to make sure that you’re answering the prompt entirely. This feels more like something that was based on the prompt, but doesn’t really get around to answering the questions that are given in the prompt. I like all the experiences you included, though. It’s easy to read and interesting.