Copy Editing

A while back, I signed on as an assistant copy editor for Dewpoint, which is the literary magazine of my university's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society.

I had to read through one poem and three short stories, find all the typos and grammar errors and all that, and compile of a list of them and their locations to send on to the editors.

So I did. I went through each piece with a few colorful pens and marked all the things that needed to be corrected. Then I put them all into a big, detailed list and sent them on to the chief copy editor. It took a while. I kept finding things. I was definitely nitpicking, but I feel like nitpicking is kind of a copy editor's job.

Today the chief copy editor sent out an email saying that the copy editing staff had sent in a total of thirteen Microsoft Word pages of corrections.

I personally contributed seven pages and a smidge.

I guess some people only had four little poems to read... but still. I contributed over half of the corrections in the entire lit mag. By myself. I'm still trying to decide whether that's impressive.