Editing

Apparently, I don’t completely suck as an editor. I’m not a total grammarian, relying less on the technical grammatical issues for identifying problems than the way proper speech is spoken. I used to speak very proper English, after having grammar drilled in my brain through about seventh grade (apparently this is unusual in North Carolina; who would have thought Texas’ education system could get something right? I jest.). Anyway, at the editing seminar tonight, we ran through some examples, including a piece that is to be printed in Friday’s paper, and I caught most of the errors the Editors-in-Chief caught, and managed to have a few good suggestions for sentence restructuring and placement. Of course, most articles don’t go through such a rigorous editing process: we had about ten people (I refuse to use numerals for such a “simple” number as ten on my site, no matter what the “official” rules) there to edit a single article. But there were food, drinks, and large amounts of laughter over the repeated use of the word “leakage” in the article. Hey, it’s better than “seepage”.

I may actually be one of very few students here at Rose that scored noticably higher on the verbal and writing sections of the PSAT and SAT than the math sections. Ugh. But I do like this editing thing. It’s fun.