Monday, May 4, 2009

Editing friends

I've found that I'm not the only one that has a stake in my progress as a student of journalism... my roommates and close friends have found a certain value in it, too.

As finals approach, it's inevitable that they will bring to me their rough drafts to edit. And the more I learn in this editing class, the rougher those drafts seem to be. My friends find it frustrating that I find what they think are irrelevant errors in every new draft they bring to me.

But they keep bringing it back.

A few months ago, I was editing the paper of my friend who's majoring in business. It was really bad. And while I was editing his paper and making comments aloud like I always do (so the writer understands why something is wrong), my roommates were also sitting in the room overhearing the edit.

They said my comments were harsh. I said it was legitimate criticism.

I feel like, as journalists, we set ourselves up for criticism. We're used to it, not only because we know it's inevitable, but also because we know someone else knows something that we don't. Maybe they don't even have the best writing skills, but they'll see something we didn't. Or they'll have a question we didn't think of.

All my friends get frustrated when they bring a paper to me. But they keep bringing it back because they know I'll see something they didn't. And that's the beauty of editing.

3 comments:

  1. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the same situation with my roommmates. Three or four weeks ago, one of them asked me to edit her paper. Sure, I didn't have much else to do, so I sat down with it. Nearly an hour later, I was at a point where I was comfortable with what she was going to turn in.
    Turns out, she got a 98 on the paper. To your point, I know that she knows more than me about the topic she was writing about, but I was happy that she came to me for an edit and I'm really proud (at least in my estimation) that she got a really high grade because of my help.

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  2. "And the more I learn in this editing class, the rougher those drafts seem to be."

    Well said. In my opinion, the latter half of my journalism career has focused in on the writing and less on the reporting side of journalism. Looking back at papers from Freshman year remind me how far I've come, something that I try to keep in mind when editing friend's papers who haven't had the training in writing and editing that we have.

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  3. My sohpomore and junior year I edited my roommates papers. I also feel like that is when I turned in my best work myself. My senior year has just been way too busy that I feel like my writing has taken a hit because I can't work on it as much.

    When I used to edit on of my roommates papers, I would add sentences randomly through it that would surely have gotten him failed (most were inappropriate), just to make sure he did a final edit himself.

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