Page 97 - Student: dazed And Confused

This poem had quite a nice ebb and flow to it and at first glance, we didn't think we would
find that much we needed to do to it. There was nothing major like deleting big chunks of it
but there were quite a few things in need of improvement when we looked closely. The
flow was disrupted in one line where there were too few syllables to maintain the rhythm.
We offered three of four alternatives that fitted well but didn't change the meaning. The
tenses were also a bit confused and we had to write a big note for the writer to take
another look at it. Were and was jumped to are and is. Things like that which you wouldn't
necessarily pick up on unless you were looking for it. Then again, there are probably
mistakes we missed that others would notice instantly. We changed a few words from
plurals to singulars and vice versa. It wasn't always technically wrong the way the writer

had said it, but it just read better and made more sense if they were changed. After that it
was just a matter of going through the punctuation which is so tiring because it means that
you as an editor have to try and remember whether each mark should be a hyphen or a
comma or a colon. We marked up the correction on the original copy in red and had it
emailed to the writer who is on another level. She agreed with all of our corrections.

The beauty of betrayal (formerly Kate's shoes)
I had to get my butcher knife out for this one because a lot of text needed to go. My editing
partner and I found an awful lot of writing that just didn't seem to fit well with the main

body of the story. There was a section relating to an issue of Cosmo mag that was
irrelevant; one that indicated that women couldn't reverse park. There were quite a few
other chunks like that and the writer told us that she was very glad we chopped them as she
had only written them to fill up the word count. She agreed that we could take them out. I
was glad that it was so easy to get the go-ahead to rip it to shreds, to have the person
pleased was a happy bonus, but I bet it's not normally this easy. We needed to change the
title as, even though Kate's Shoes was straight to the point, we thought it sounded too
obvious and boring. It was quite a while before we could find something we all agreed on.
It ended as just being a sentence from the story which had been twisted to make a title. We
also had to write the ending again as we learnt that much of the final section was

increasingly not working. We got the okay to cut the lines that were worst. What was
meant to be a simple line rewrite turned into a list of possible solutions to get something
punchy and final which rounds it off well. But we found something in the end although I am
still not entirely happy with it.

The weighting game (my work)
It was easy to have my work edited but I was slightly surprised that they had chosen this
piece. I had sent in two others that I had spent much longer on though I presume they
chose this as it is quite personal and is about a very current issue. But I only spent about ten

minutes on it - and it needed so few things doing to it. When I am writing, I tend to go
through a very basic form of mental self-editing by telling myself if something works or mot.
My editors were having a problem with the tenses but, except for one mistake I let them