International Journal of Sport Finance
I entered my internship assuming I’d be doing different types of editing, so when my first assignment was to copy-edit the upcoming edition of the International Journal of Sport Finance I was not surprised.
This assignment taught me a lot about practical editing concerns. I learned to check the headers and the footers, which are things that I’ve noticed editing mistakes in before, but probably would’ve forgotten without being told, and learned that there are often mistakes in typesetting the equations, so they need to be checked very meticulously against the original. It also taught me to trust in my edits, because they’re usually better than I first assume, and that there will be room for improvement, but that doesn’t mean my work is subpar. It’s just human to miss things.
Format Stripping
Another basic editing project I had was to strip the formatting from the documents. This includes things like returning centered text to left-justified and removing the boldedness from text that is going to be a header. It also involves a lot of checking about whether things that are supposed to be headers of sections get an <h> tag (<h1> meaning chapter titles, <h2> being large section dividers, and so on).
This is an example of a few pages stripped of their formatting. You can see that where pictures/tables/etc. are to be inserted, the text is centered and in angled brackets (<>). This centered text is okay, since it’s to get the typesetter’s attention and is going to be deleted anyway.
This task was a learning one in that it taught me a lot about the process of publishing. Getting rid of things like automatic numbering and bulleting of lists would never have occurred to me. I think I learned a lot about non-editing things while performing editing tasks.
Flow Checking
Checking for flow was another basic editing task I was assigned. A new edition of a book was coming out, and the text in Adobe changed just enough that the amount of text on each page was a little different. It barely changed the way the text was on the page, and usually the words on any given page in the old edition and new edition were the same exact words, just maybe with a few words falling on different lines than in the old one. However, we needed to make sure that if any text went onto a new page, the flow didn’t ruin any of the tables or get deleted in some way.
So I checked the old edition against the new edition for each of the 302 pages. There were only a dozen or so differences in flow at the end of pages, but I marked them and how the previous version had ended.
Here you can see in Adobe that I just flagged the text that ended differently. This was a learning experience in the same was the previous example was. The difference in flow between editions was never something I would’ve thought of before!
Another thing these two projects in particular taught me was to be more discerning. I thought after my editing class with Dr. Catherine Gouge that I was very discerning; however, between these really meticulous jobs and learning to watch out for italicized commas in references and periods between Ph.D. and M.D. (we remove them according to our style guide), I realized there’s always room for improvement and always things I’m going to miss. The best I can do is learn what sorts of things I do miss and try to look out for them in the future.
Reference Moving and Checking
Another copy-editing project I had was to go over a chapter sent in late by the authors and go through and remove the citations from the comment bubbles that they left in the document and integrate them into a references list. This was difficult because I expected the authors to know APA better than me. I’ve mostly worked with MLA. However, in transferring the sources over, I found quite a few punctuation errors (there would be commas where there should be periods or vice versa), so I would change them.
But then on a second look through my own edits, I found that I’d missed some other inconsistencies. In APA, you’re supposed to only capitalize the first letter in a title instead of all the non-function ones in MLA (APA: Bach’s history a signal that his leadership will be proactive. MLA: “Bach’s History a Signal That His Leadership Will Be Proactive.”) There’s also a lack of quotes around many things that would have quotation marks around them in MLA. These are the sort of errors I corrected in my own edits and highlighted in this next document.
So although the topic here is editing, I still learned a lot about many other areas as well as editing. I learned that no one is infallible, even authors, and that there will always be edits I miss, and some of those edits are likely to be APA citation things for now as well as things in FiT’s style guide that I’m not accustomed to.
Kiersten Woods 