I feel that my experiences and efforts as a student strongly reflect my dedication and desire to work as an editor. Below you will find information about relevant coursework, projects, writing, and research.

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Editing

While I was formerly a creative writing student and desired to work professionally as a poet, after taking Dr. Cheryl Ball’s Editing course I fell in love with the profession. As a student of Dr. Ball’s during the Fall 2015 semester, I learned to copy-edit, proofread, query, how to create a style guide, communicate with a team of editing colleagues, and much more.

Topics: Developmental editing, copy-editing, information architecture, publishing, research, querying, style guides, wikis, etc.

Strengths: I very quickly adapted to the demands of the editing vocation and learned rapidly the skills necessary to succeed

Lessons Learned: My time with Dr. Ball has reinforced lessons I learned early on as a language professional. These include the need for attention to detail, the importance of dealing with and meeting deadlines, working autonomously, the ability to improvise, and the importance of clear, succinct communication.

Multimedia Writing

Topics: Writing Multimodally, Telecommunication, Engaging Audience, Effect of Internet on Education/Life

Strengths: I was able to complete a significantly challenging course while taking it online. I collaborated effectively on group projects using only electronic methods of collaboration and communication. I created multimodal texts that were both engaging and informative.

Lessons Learned: Online learning requires a degree of commitment and maturity not demanded of students during in-person courses. This is directly relevant to my desire to be a freelancer. Autonomy requires one to be an excellent self-manager, in the same way that online courses require a student to be attentive to deadlines, punctuality (in communication and turning in work early to avoid technical difficulties), and to be fluent in many methods of multimodal work.

Business/Professional Writing

Topics: Writing like a professional, professional development, Information and Analytic Reports

Strengths: I was able to produce a high volume of documents all in the same field in a short amount of time each week, as I was enrolled in the Technical Writing course at the same time. I was able to remedy my shortcomings, and quickly adapt to a new and demanding learning environment.

Lessons Learned: I should never assume that because I am inherently a writer that my skills are equal to the task at hand. I underestimated the difficulty level of the course initially, but quickly adapted and applied myself with more force to being a professional writer. I also learned the importance of a unified and cohesive professional portfolio with well thought-out personal statement, cover letter, and resume. Finally, I learned how to succinctly inform an audience in a professional report or memo.

Technical Writing

Topics: Creating technical documents including manuals, instructions, diagrams, and memos

Strengths: I was able once again to produce a high volume of documents in a short amount of time. I used my design and spatial skills to create attractive, concise, clear documents that effectively communicated sophisticated information.

Lessons Learned: I learned that the most important aspects of technical writing are clarity and concision. Technical documents must effectively bridge the gap between experts who need to communicate the vital information they hold and the audience who may not be experienced with the technical nature of the information they must understand. It is the duty of the technical writer to reconcile these populations.

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Projects and Creations:

• Different Methods of Presenting Poetry Multimodally and their Effects

This project intends to provide an understanding of how different forms of spoken poetry differ, and the effects of those differences.

Why Technology Fails to Transcend Us (And How It Remains Inferior to Religion)

This video describes a chapter of Sherry Turkle’s book, Alone Together. The chapter analyzed is “Always On”. I discuss Turkle’s stance that technology ultimately detracts from our experience of life, and how this is relative to religion as an institution intended to improve our way of life that is superior to technology.

Heroin Hurts: A Website for Drug Abuse Activism in WV

This website was created by four team members in an effort to combat an issue that profoundly affects West Virginia. Please visit the site to receive info on the heroin epidemic in WV, and to find out how you can help.

My work during my time at the West Virginia Culture Center was various and challenging, but the most rewarding project I had the pleasure of working on was the Highway Historical Markers Project. I performed preliminary research and authored 35 new signs during my time working with the WV State Archives.

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Highway Historical Markers Project

I wrote 35 new markers while working with the West Virginia State Archives. The criterion for writing these markers is demanding. Each marker must accurately summarize and depict the historical event or location in question, while also adhering to the limits of the design.

Each line may not exceed 35 characters (including spaces), for a total of 11 lines of text. Writing often took much longer than expected, as the text had to be drafted and rewritten in many iterations to find the draft that best fit.

Here are two examples of the work I completed that will appear on signs after 2016:

Dr. Edwin Flowers is a former vice president of West Virginia University (1983-1997), supreme court justice of WV, federal circuit court judge, welfare commissioner, Airforce JAG, and lawyer.

My primary function working with Dr. Flowers is as editor on a series of memoirs dedicated to his grandchildren. The current edition I am editing is concerned with his military career as a lawyer and judge advocate general.

As the only editor working on this text I have collaborated with Dr. Flowers and completed all developmental editing, copy-editing, style guide creation, design, formatting, and layout of the book. This text is due to be completed by the close of 2016, and will be published through Educational Publishers, WV.

Capstone Internship: The DPI and Managing Editor

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Managing Editor

As managing editor of the editing course, I oversaw more than 20 new editors as they completed editing on the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) session reviews to be posted in Kairos 2016.

These editors saw the texts through nearly all stages of production including style guide creation, copy-editing, XML markup, author queries, and final transmission to the wiki. It was my job to assist the editors in any task that gave them trouble, in order to ensure the high quality of the final collection. In order to better anticipate problems, Dr. Ball had me revise and prepare instructions for each stage of editing. These instructions may be accessed through Dropbox. I also completed my own editing of the stages to work alongside editors and anticipate their challenges and problems, and those documents may be found here.

The stages of editing which editors were guided through in Dr. Ball’s course proceed as follows.

Stage 1: This stage is simply a first read-through of the document, and includes the creation of a style sheet, query document, and marked concerns about the document that have not been actually addressed through editing yet. After stage 1 proofreading, the document passed to another editor to begin copy-editing.

Stage 2: This stage is copy-editing of the text. Editors were asked to catalog all of the edits made, and to query problems in the document to either their overseeing editor (me) or the author if necessary.

Stage 3: XML markup was performed during this stage in order to prep the session reviews for transmission to the the Kairos wiki.

Stage 4: This stage was the actual transmission of documents to the wiki, which resulted in the need for editors to proofread source code, perform copy-editing, and link the appropriate pages together on the wiki table of contents.

Finally, editors were asked to compile and add all remaining author queries to boilerplate which I was responsible for sending out to authors at the end of the semester.

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I made myself available via team-communication platform Slack as much as possible, and often would troubleshoot problems for editors via the web. This role taught me to anticipate problems, communicate effectively with many staff members, and reinforced general editing skills. Below are some sample transcripts of interactions with editors:

kazunegri [12:16 AM]
Hey, question when you get the chance. About an in-text citation, it’s citing an online source which is just a page (http://www.clemson.edu/faculty-staff/faculty-senate/documents/free-speech/vulnerability-todd-may-2016.pdf). They didn’t include anything at the end, just “Todd May (2016) before the couple of pulled quotes. Looking at the APA book it was a little confusing as to whether it actually needed anything at the end or not as there’s no page number (singular page) and no paragraph numbers, and just a singular header. Basically, I don’t know whether I should be adding a (“The Administration of Vulnerability,” para. 4) to the end of the quotes. What would you think? It’s RNF paragraph 4 if you need to look at it

kazunegri [12:50 AM]
Also – I’m having the same box problem Meghan did and removing the content control isn’t doing it for me. It gets rid of the box, but still edits everything that was in it.

mattjrt [8:53 AM]
Hey Kazu, I probably won’t be able to get to this until later today.

kazunegri [11:01 AM]
No problem, thanks

mattjrt [3:15 PM]
Hey Kazu, I’m meeting with Alexis at 5 in the downtown library if you’d be interested in meeting in person. Or I can get to your concerns right after that session.

kazunegri [3:47 PM]
Ah damn. I would but I’m at work during, sorry. Just whenever you have a chance to would be great. Thanks

mattjrt [4:55 PM]
Sure, no problem.

mattjrt [5:15 PM]
So the method in which they quoted the Todd source is fine I think. In regards to the formatting troubles, I’ve tried to investigate this a little and can’t figure out what is causing it. Try highlighting the section and then hitting the remove formatting button. If this doesn’t work, I’ve found that manually deleting the text in question and then replacing it entirely works.

mattjrt [5:34 PM]
In the Todd quote, I was wondering about maybe using brackets though. He inserts his own words in the center of that quote to clarify, which is the purpose of bracketing within a quote. I’m not sure how Kairos uses brackets in quotes though.

[5:34]
You might research APA style for bracketing within quotes

kazunegri [7:19 PM]
Oh, good point. The book does say to do so and the Kairos style page doesn’t say anything specific about it so I’ll do that. Thanks!

mattjrt [7:21 PM]
Glad to help 😀

kazunegri [7:22 PM]
I might hit you up with a couple other things as I’m finishing up but I’ll try not to overload you, haha

mattjrt [7:23 PM]
No problem

kazunegri [7:32 PM]
Ok, I’m a little lost with the running style sheet – I’m looking at the example in the instructions, are ours supposed to be in future tense? I feel like I’m still not super sure what I’m supposed to stick in there, especially that now we’re editing and everything that’s done in there is seen via the track changes on the document

mattjrt [7:34 PM]
I’m not sure what you’re seeing that’s in the future tense?

kazunegri [7:35 PM]
Might not have been the right term. Like.. “open web/wiki editor” opposed to “opened”

mattjrt [7:35 PM]
uploaded and commented on a file
a.34_stylesheet.docx
Word Document
Click to download
1 Comment
Here’s a style sheet of mine from last year, for example

mattjrt [7:37 PM]
I was stage 4 editor on those docs, so you can see a difference in style between me and the other editor

kazunegri [7:37 PM]
Huh. Okay. So basically it’s just as simple as to note every change you’ve made?

mattjrt [7:38 PM]
The examples in the doc on Dropbox aren’t even quite as specific as my classmate and I had done there. Yep, it’s just noting each change to show consistency (if you did it once you should do it in all cases), and to explain very quickly if necessary.

kazunegri [7:40 PM]
Oof. That’s a mega pain with how many changes I made, haha… Alright, thanks again

mattjrt [7:41 PM]
Sure, you can shorten the process by describing universal edits at the top before you go line by line

[7:42]
For example, say the author failed to add the year to every citation they made, you could note this at the top as “Corrected all in-text citations lacking citation year.” (edited)

[7:42]
and you wouldn’t have to do those for every line, make sense?

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mlmcminn [3:02 PM]
@mattjrt So I’m trying to add an in text citation of a foundation’s website, should it be (name of the foundation, year), (name of website, year), (name of page on website, year), or should it just be the web address in parentheses? I’m having trouble finding it in the APA manual. I also looked it up on apastyle.org but I found a few different recommendations on how to do it.

mattjrt [3:05 PM]
@mlmcminn what session review is it? I’ll take a look in a few

mlmcminn [3:05 PM]
It’s M.10, paragraph 13.

[3:06]
The author directly quotes the website but doesn’t provide a citation or a reference.

mattjrt [3:26 PM]
@mlmcminn so the only phrase actually quoted from the website is “a strong voice for women in our community”, which comes from the about page of that foundation. (https://www.gcfdn.org/Investing-in-Greater-Cincinnati/The-Womens-Fund/About-Us/Our-Focus)

[3:27]
I can see why you had trouble with this. This was the most relevant information I could find. It would seem that the in-text citation requires the page/article title of the webpage from which the information was obtained. http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/web-page-no-author.aspx
http://www.apastyle.org
How do you reference a web page that lists no author?
Provides APA Style guidelines on citing web pages that don’t specify an author.
[3:29]
In this case, I believe I would use an in-text citation of (Our Focus, 2016)

mlmcminn [3:31 PM]
The next quote in that paragraph comes from their the issues page, since it’s from a different page should it be (The Issues, 2016)? And thank you!

mattjrt [3:34 PM]
@mlmcminn Yes, I believe so. Also, each of those references would have their own citation in the References section.

mlmcminn [3:35 PM]
Okay, thank you so much!

mattjrt [3:35 PM]
No problem 😀

I also learned to be a more effective teacher. When I was able to teach my staff to be better editors, it reduced the amount of difficulties we would encounter and taught me how to be a better editor myself.

Kairos 2015/16

I received credit for my role as editor on the Kairos 2016 CCCC session reviews. I am also credited as an editor on the Kairos 2015 CCCC session reviews, as I worked on these reviews during the course mentioned earlier.

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Bad Ideas About Writing

This collection of essays seeks to provide teachers, parents, and administrators with short, provocative, and thoroughly researched counter-arguments to common myths in writing. Examples of such myths include, ”

As a late-stage editor of this collection, I was tasked with very light copy-editing, cross-checking of texts against prospectus, as well as compiling and rewriting queries to return revisions to authors.

An example of some of the work I completed is shown below:

Open Access Week

In addition to editing tasks, I helped coordinate Open Access Week 2016. The Digital Publishing Institute undertook the organizing and promotion of these events as part of efforts to raise awareness about Open Access and the DPI.

In order to reach open access authors at West Virginia University, I compiled a roster of those who had published open access articles by cross checking personnel files with materials supplied by the WVU libraries. The result was a roster of over 350 open access affiliated authors.