Editing Samples
I'm a talented editor. I have an eye for detail, and I'm familiar with both Chicago and APA styles. Take a look at my editing!
Style Guide for
Women Employed
by Makenna Matos and Madi Young (used with permission)
I edited an in-house style guide that some of my classmates made. Their style guide needed to be based on The Chicago Manual of Style and to include at least ten guidelines that addressed principles of global English as described in John R. Kohl’s Global English Style Guide. My classmates included reinforcements of Chicago’s rules in addition to guidelines describing when to depart from Chicago’s rules.
My classmates’ style guide was written to be used by Women Employed, an organization that works to create systemic change to empower working women. I edited this style guide for clarity, consistency, and correctness. One big issue with this style guide was the length. The class assignment called for this paper to be about ten pages in length; this style guide ended up being nineteen pages in length, almost twice the length that it should have been. Thus, many of my edits are suggestions for removing unnecessary or unclear guidelines. Also, because I had to edit twice the amount of writing than was originally agreed to, I couldn’t give as many detailed edits as I would have liked to. I had to prioritize the most egregious errors and leave some of the smaller errors in the text.
What We Say and How We Say It: Editorial Language and Its Persuasiveness to Authors
by Henry Sorensen
(used with permission)
In my Basic Editing Skills class at BYU, my classmates and I each wrote an empirical paper. I was assigned to edit Henry Sorensen’s paper called “What We Say and How We Say It: Editorial Language and Its Persuasiveness to Authors.” Henry wrote his paper to explore what types of editorial language are most convincing to authors. I edited his paper for clarity and correctness. These edits pertain particularly to this draft of his paper. I also made positive comments to show that I communicate effectively with the author.
Note that Henry’s paper included two appendices: Appendix I listed the questions Henry used in his survey; Appendix II showed the data that he gathered. In this sample, I didn’t include either appendix because I didn’t make any edits to either one. Also note that this was one of my earlier projects; I have learned many more editing skills since I edited this paper.
A War of Definitions:
Defining the Perceived Distinctions between Editors and Writers
by Madi Young
(used with permission)
In my Basic Editing Skills class at BYU, my classmates and I each wrote an empirical paper (to read my empirical paper, see Bothersome Blunders: An Empirical Study). I was assigned to edit Madi Young’s paper called “A War of Definitions: Defining the Perceived Distinctions Between Editors and Writers.” Madi wrote her paper to explore how authors and editors have different ideas about editing. I edited his paper for clarity and correctness. These edits pertain particularly to this draft of her paper. I also made positive comments to show that I communicate effectively with the author.