Learning the language

As a result of my discussion last week with my supervisor, I was given an assignment on a few pamphlets and brochures for ED employees regarding privacy and security of the confidential information with which they deal.

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Generally, this has been the most enjoyable assignment I’ve had. This is probably for two reasons. One, I am getting quicker at spotting many basic editing mistakes (superfluous capitalization, serial commas, hyphens/en dashes/em dashes, ect.). And this comfort is allowing me to take a significant step by focusing less on these smaller issues, and more on the issues my supervisor continuously has questions about (What do they mean when they’re saying this? They mention that they will mention this later and don’t; where is it? Is this fact really true?).

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This has been a hard transition because I have always looked at printed work with a fairly uncritical eye. Because, I mean, it’s printed; so it must be legitimate, right? Answer: no. People are always trying to win a point and make their argument, often times pushing the line. And, people can always make mistakes – even numbers, which I would assume are easy to transfer over, have been misquoted. And it’s not that the people writing these things aren’t smart, they are, but it’s that they’ve got their own agendas and they’re still flawed humans. Moral of the story: people write all we read, so even a slight degree of skepticism should be brought to everything.

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But, back to my assignment. I enjoyed working on the layout, and even had stylistic contributions for the pamphlets. But after my supervisor and I had gone over all of my corrections, the document was covered with eraser marks, my small scrawl, and nearly-illegible-to-anyone-else-but-me editing marks.

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So, in an effort to make my time spent editing worthwhile to the OMB, I went through the entire document and copied each of our edits onto a clean copy. While I have been picking up on certain editing marks as I’ve looked at the edits of some of my coworkers, this was the first time I had gone through a document with the AP stylebook open to the “Editing Marks” page. Now I’m in-the-know and can edit in a consistent way that, more importantly, can be interpreted by everyone else.