I found this exercise interesting in that it narrowed attention to details of our partner’s piece (which, of course, is what is meant by microediting!*). My inclination would probably be to macroedit first, but as we heard in class, that’s a matter of personal preference. And maybe it would vary depending on the piece.

I tried to keep the main points from Bell in mind and was able to use at least one of them. The tasks of underlining, circling, and highlighting kept me pretty busy, though, and I realized that a lot more time would be needed to apply all of Bell’s suggestions. I can see it as an excellent reference for future editing, whether of my work or others. In fact, I’ve used some of her suggestions in my reviewing my own work already.

I have to agree with Shelby about finding quite a number of adjectives essential to the meaning of a phrase. This brings to mind that the conversation between writer and editor can help to untangle some of that, by jointly considering which ones are essential.

Using the index cards was somewhat helpful, and this seems silly to say – but I’d probably use just one to follow line-by-line instead of framing with the two.

* This, in itself, is an example of redundancy, as mentioned by Bell :).

 

Thursday was my first time to do microediting. Usually when I do editing, I focus on the lead, end and the whole structure. But for this time, I focus on each sentence and I found using small card to cover the article is really helpful. But I have to admit that gramma is not what I’m good at so I didn’t do too much on it. Also, it’s always interested to read other’s article. I can also learn from other’s work.

Rachel and I worked together to edit our profile pieces. All editing aside, I was interested to read her piece because it was about a local apparel company I had considered writing about myself, but decided against it. I learned a lot from her article!

I think we also learned a lot just from talking with each other about how we both tend to write how we talk, how hard it is to work against an 800 word limit, and how we invariably uncover information while reporting that could be a story in and of itself.

As far as the technical elements of our editing session are concerned, I found the index cards helpful, but will probably not highlight adjectives and adverbs in future. For a compulsively literal person such as myself, the instruction to highlight all adjectives and adverbs results in a page that is almost entirely yellow, because you have highlighted words that are grammatically adjectives, but obviously cannot be taken away (ex: the “social” in social medial. So that was too much for me. But because I can be a little all over the place while editing (and writing), I appreciated how the index cards made me focus on only one or two lines at a time.

I found microediting Shelby’s paper to be a helpful exercise. I liked only focusing on one aspect at a time, and it allowed me to make the most helpful critiques. I think it made a difference in my editing skills because it pointed out all of the different elements that needed to be edited. I would use this technique again, although slightly more time consuming, I think it would allow for the most beneficial editing.