Effective Copyediting

For this section, I decided to choose my self-editing assignment from Editing for Clarity, Usage, and Style. I created a style sheet and tracked my changes in Microsoft Word.

The document that I edited was written for my World Literature class and included a lot of grammatical and usage errors, so that is what I edited my document for. The organization of the document was well done and it was easy for the reader to follow.

My audience for this assignment was my professor and a committee that was evaluating the class. The content and organization of the document allowed for me to get my point across, but the grammatical errors throughout the paper may have distracted some readers. Fixing these errors was easy once I knew how to look for them.

I tracked my changes in Microsoft Word and recorded the errors that I found on a style sheet. My most common errors were present and past verb tenses, pronoun reference, pronoun agreement, comma splices, and misplaced modifiers. The textbook I was assigned for this class made it very easy to learn about and practice editing to fix these grammatical errors. Grammar Bytes also helped me learn and practice these skills and many more.

To this day, I still struggle with present and past verb tenses in my writing. I have learned strategies in this class, as well as from other professors to help me fix this issue. Implementing the editing strategies I learned throughout my time in the program has strengthened my skills as an editor, as well as taking the time to do multi-pass editing. I am still improving my editing skills and practicing patience with multi-pass editing.

Self Editing Assignment

https://jmckenziehansen.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Self_Self-Edit.docx