Early Morning Edits
Last week I got a position copy editing for Evergreen's student newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal. I've been an avid, well, browser, of the CPJ since my freshman year, but I've never gotten particularly excited about it. I'm not sure how it measures up as far as student papers go, but its content (oh, letters to the editor!) and style (if I had a dollar for each copy error...) have long been points of contention around these parts. Finally, I decided to stop being a passive observer and get involved.
The straw that broke the camel's back was an article that one of the staff reporters wrote about the play I produced, The Birds. The article was benign enough, no scathing critiques or wild claims, but it boasted a slew of embarrassing mistakes that began with a missing word in the first sentence. My own writing is far from perfect and I'm not immune to copy errors, but I decided that if I was upset enough to blab about it to everyone I knew, I should at least translate my energy into something productive. So last night was my first attempt--the task of copy editing began at 9p.m. and ended at 4:30 a.m. (yes, a.m.!) with a few cups of coffee and cold egg rolls in between. Needless to say, though I did my best as a first-timer, I was humbled by how daunting and nuanced a task editing is. Today, we had a "postmortem" meeting to flesh out all the errors that we let slip through...and there were plenty. Agenda for next week: talk less talk, walk more walk.