Page 95 - Student: dazed And Confused

piece we wanted from any given author. At the end, when time was starting to become an
issue, pieces were not being picked for their potential but for how much work they needed.

The editing wasn't too bad but I thought it would be. We were all split into editing
groups of two or three and given some pieces to edit. The first couple of weeks were spent
self-editing. It was one of the hardest parts for me because I have a wandering mind and I
kept getting distracted by the content. My editing pair had the following pieces to edit:-

• Lemonade - a poem

• Christmas lights: Haughton - a poem
• Garden of tranquillity - a poem
• The beauty of betrayal - a short story

It was actually easier than I thought to edit these. The most part of the process was
taken by simply fixing punctuation and the odd word or tense. Some of the pieces needed

to have the odd phrase taken out or added. I say it was easier than the selection and it was
really, though it was weird trying to figure out which bits actually needed work. You have to
be quite specific in which spellings and mixed metaphors can be allowed to slide as creative
license, and about which bits really should be looked at in case readers think you haven't
done your job properly.
So, I went through the pieces on my own and flagged up the errors I saw while my
editing partner did the same with those works to mark the ones she found. Luckily, I didn't
get allocated any of the pieces that had been deemed as requiring a lot of editing. I was
grateful for that. But I did change one poem called 'Appointment with death' to another by
the same author - the aforementioned 'Garden of tranquillity.' We thought the former
piece was bland, technically poor, met none of the standard conventions and the idea

behind it had been done to death, and then some. To get it to a standard that seemed
acceptable to me seemed like a lot of time and effort. As time was really of the essence
now, we decided on the latter work which needed far less time spent on it. The idea and
the writing were far superior too - it is a mystery why it wasn't in the original list.

I was quite nervous about meeting the writers of the works we had edited in case
they thought their prize pieces had been mercilessly butchered. It's strange to know that
previous years have been through exactly the same thing, but quite heartening to know that
this endless road has an end point. However, I think most of the other group (who were

editing our work) were feeling the same way. No-one ever wants to feel like they are
destroying the self-confidence of fellow write-hards, but that's the way it is. Everything has
to be edited and there's no getting away from it - shame that it is. It'd be nice to look at
every piece of writing that comes our way and say that it is perfect as it is. It can't be like
that because we can't learn to be better writers if no-one tells us what we did wrong.