Tayler Green

ENGL 4183

Dr. Wickliff

April 20, 2017

Final Assessment

ENGL 4182: Editing with Digital Technologies has been an informative and

challenging, creating a where I feel to have earned many real-world takeaways. The texts in the

course guided the edits made across the semester, the interaction with the authors of the

documents, and furthered my own understanding of how to edit texts. Judith A. Tarutzs

Technical Editing had a number of interesting takeaways regarding the style of the edits

themselves, my favorite being not afraid to use red ink, or red text, and the relationships between

authors and editors. Carol Fisher Sallers The Subversive Copy Editor provided a funny and

relatable series of experiences with editing that overlapped with many of Tarutzs points, but

with real-world examples. Brusaw, Alred and Olius Handbook of Technical Writing cannot go

unmentioned either. This handbook provided and effective overview and reference material for

the entirety of the semester, and while I will never be able to remember every single intricacy of

the English language and writing style, it is, and will continue to be, a useful guide for editing

and writing. The handbook came in especially useful for editing Dr. Wickliffs manuscript,

where I needed to review ellipses and quotations, and in Project 3, with understanding the use of

contractions in casual toned writing. The individual assignments in the typically went along with

the handbook and reinforced the editing eye of how to search for them. I liked these short
assignmentsthey ranged from academic to news articles, and were a fun way to get my brain

working before heavier editing projects.

Project 1 was a hybrid group/individual project, where we would edit the chapter of Dr.

Wickliffs manuscript individually, but come together in small groups to compare edits on the

same chapter. Our group work to compare edits was a valuable aspect of the project. It was

useful to have three other people to catch errors, point out parts of the manuscript they had

questions about, or reflect together on the comments we made on certain parts. It was difficult

sometimes to follow each member as we each had our own document on a different laptop, but

we were all very patient in waiting for members to find the page, and then describe the

paragraph/line number. I feel that together, our edits were very comprehensive and thorough.

This was a bit difficult to peer edit, as most of our edits in this project were not higher-level

concerns, but rather formatting and spacing errors. However, as a group we did manage to run

through the pages with the time we were given, and discuss any concerns we had with the

project.

I used Adobe Acrobat to edit the Figures, and I have also used Adobe before, and this was

not an issue either. I prefer Adobe when making edits for others, as well as for receiving edits

the access of the different functions (comments, strike through, sticky-notes) is heaven to an

editor. Word certainly has its perks too, but Acrobat is simply a step-above. I enjoyed being able

to use it for the Figures, at least. As I mentioned in my first assessment of Project 1, it was my

first manuscript of any kind, and moreover, my first editing project that was not someone I knew

personally or met with face-to-face. I have also never dealt with editing graphics and figures, and

taking on the job of ensuring that the figures in the chapter matched the number in the actual

figures section. This was rather tedious, but certainly an important part of editing a manuscript
like this. Looking back, this project structured my tone to approach editing at a professional

distance, and how to work with a document that falls under both science and history. With the

feedback from Dr. Wickliff, I had to take a second look at the handbook in order to understand

the use of longer quotations and their use of ellipses. In my final edits, I mostly went back to add

examples where I had pointed out errors in my comments, but not provided a suggestion to

correct it. This project certainly showed me how to manage a larger document and stay focused

on professional, and useful comments for the author.

Project 2 was a small group project where we worked in pairs on editing a technical

report from the ENGL 4181: Writing User Documents class. This project came much easier to

me, as I have been a student of Writing User Documents in a prior semester. That course taught

me a great deal about the style of technical writing, and enabled me to land a tech writing

position the following summer. Initially in the project, Christina and I found it surprising that in

the students assessment sent to us, they mentioned that they wrote the report before analyzing

the data. This was a troubling statement to read as a writer and editor, and we both approached

the document with a bit of a negative outlook, where we knew we would have to look out for

inconsistency with the data and generalizations, or writing to fill the space, where the students

were simply writing rather than analyzing. This was the case too. But after the feedback from

project one, where I was told to provide suggestions and not just point out instances where re-

wording was needed, I feel like I was able to actually help the writers out with their trouble

analyzing data. I wouldnt consider myself a subject matter expert by any means, but because

Ive taken the class and understand the requirements of the reports, my feedback to the writers

was constructive criticism and professional-level editing. This project certainly taught me how to

hold back frustration within my comments when errors continually occur, and to create a system
of editing (e.g. color coding continual errors, and highlighting them to the writer, rather than

commenting every time they occur). I enjoyed using Adobe Acrobat to edit, often comparing it to

Word; with Word, I liked the neatness of the comments section and, sometimes, the Track

Changes feature. However, the seemingly free-form layout of Adobe Acrobat made it very useful

to insert sticky notes, cross through sections, insert words, highlight, and overall mark-up the

page without the formatting constrictions of Word, while still having the track of changes on the

sidebar with comments in Adobe.

It was also an enjoyable group work and collaboration experience with Christina each class

period, which can often be rare to come by in group work. Christina and I edited the reports

separately, but came together for two weeks to compare and discuss edits. We found it was a

great use of class time to talk about higher-level concerns we had with the report (i.e. tone,

format, content, quality of analysis) rather than compare reports side-by-side for lower-level

concerns (i.e. grammar, punctuation, misuse of pronouns), of which we felt certain that both of

us would find without any difficulty. The main takeaway from editing this report was truly

putting our understanding of technical writing into explaining out request for edits to the group.

We were thankful to have had a background of technical writing courses before attempting to

edit this report; otherwise, we may not have been able to explain certain aspects we disagreed

with in the report (e.g. the group presented tables of qualitative data that was not efficient in a

usability reportthis would be effective if it was quantitative and statistical data).

The feedback from Project 2 was also appreciated, and I spent most of my revisions

combing Christinas document and mine, since in the original submission we were unable to

combine the documents with Adobe Acrobat. I also added sentences where I questioned the
clarity or structure of sentences without providing a suggestion. Now the document is one single

draft that reflects both of our edits.

Project 3 was my favorite project to work with, although it was incredibly daunting at

first. Finding the documents to work with seemed difficult, and I was at a loss for whom to reach

out to. My friend and recent UNCC English department graduate, Grayson Collins landed a

writing job for a small company in uptown, and had a series of public relations documents like

blogs, user reviews, and press releases that she needed edited. After gaining the proper

permission for a student to edit these documents, I was able to receive a large and diverse series

of documents for my project. I believe I enjoyed editing these documents so much because of

their differences to the academic and manuscript-side of editing we had done in the class before.

The first document, the press release about Duke Energy from Wielechowski and Fuller

dealt more with proofreading and rewriting example sentences for clarity. In this document and

with the time constraint, I found that it would be most effective to use track changes and take

more editorial power to reword sentences.

Document 2, the customer review of the Buick Envision, dealt with edits to make the

piece a bit longer and fuller in content and description, fleshing out more of the ideas that she

introduced. Grayson shared that she was not given a great deal of direction on what she should

write about, but that her company simply sent her out to test drive the car and write up a review.

She also mentioned that she wrote it on her phone, so I should very much expect a number of

issues. In this article, I felt more comfortable editing, as I didnt simply make changes without

consent, but provide a number of notes with suggestions and example sentences. Many of my

edits were about the tone of the piece, which was fun to play around with. Although it was one of
the shorter documents edited, I feel like the edits improved her writing process for the second

draft.

Document 3, the advertisement for Mount Airy events and the Mount Airy Toyota dealer

was a particularly interesting piece to edit because of its fusion of subjects. The edits in this

project worked to integrate both subjects so that the reader would not fully be reading an ad

about the car features, and still get information about the events. Another aspect I found

interesting about editing this piece was editing in Word, when its clear that the document is

going to be online and formatted much differently. There were some instances of headlines being

formatted, but I didnt comment a great deal on hierarchy of information, because I assumed that

the final product may appear must different.

Finally, document 4 was the graduate school statement, and went through various edits

through Google Docs, Word, and in-person communication. This type of editing was much more

in my league, as I worked as a writing tutor for 2 and half years, and learned specifically what to

write for these documents. Casey, the student applying for school, and I had a Google docs and

worked on this at times simultaneously and other time with me sending comments, so Ive

combined two documents showing the changes made, and tried to include some of the comments

from the doc. Looking back, I likely did rewrite more in my voice than his, but it was a process

of collaboration and he consented to the edits as they were suggested. Much of these edits were

cutting back on childhood background information, being direct and concise with the 1 page

limit, and expanding more on his academic and professional interests.

From the feedback of Project 3, I was shocked to see the errors I overlooked. I certainly

did not have as careful of an eye as I originally thought with Graysons documents; I now

understand the importance of taking my time and re-reading multiple times over a document for
errors. I went back to my writing center roots and did personal, quiet read-aloud sessions to catch

the remaining errors. With the feedback, I believe these documents now represent professional

grade work. I also failed to include a style sheet and a letter of transmittal in the original

submission, so the portfolio now includes these completed documents.

In other technical writing classes and in my own editing work outside of class, I have

always used Word to edit, and occasionally dabbled with Adobe Acrobat. In this course, I found

myself using both quite evenly, and I feel much more confident with the functions and benefits

of using Adobe Acrobat. I enjoy the freedom of Adobe products in general, but I do like the

neatness of Word, for documents that are in their final stages of edits and do not require an

overwhelming amount of comments.