First 2 Weeks

The first couple of weeks at my internship have been wonderful. I've already learned valuable information about editing and the larger process of publishing.

On the first day of my internship, I began working on a large project, a book that has been in the works for about two years so far. The book is called The New Sport and Exercise Psychology Companion and is a compilation of about 27 articles by various academics in the field. First, I edited the author and editor biographies, checking for consistency of font style, spelling, punctuation, etc. I went over the changes with my supervisor, Matt, and asked some questions about FiT's policy on some editing choices (for instance, they choose not to use any punctuation in "PhD").

Matt gave me a folder of emails from the authors detailing their own edits to their respective articles, which I transcribed onto a printed manuscript. The manuscript already had marks on it from another editor, so I used his marks as a reference for how to do my own. Since the pages are not double-spaced, FiT editors have a sort of hybrid system--they put some form of the editor's mark within the text and write the full marks to the side of the text. For example, if one line of text needs a word inserted and a word deleted, the marks in text would be an insertion carrot ^ and a deletion mark through the appropriate word. To the side of that line of text would be the insertion carrot along with the inserted word, followed by a dividing line ("|") and the deletion mark again.

The process of transcribing the author edits onto the manuscript was a surprisingly lengthy job, especially since the book is about 600 pages long and the authors' edits were often inconsistent, incorrect, or confusing. The process of transcribing these edits carried over into the second and third days of my internship. Throughout the transcription, I kept notes about the edits I wasn't sure of, as well as any questions that the original editor had written on the manuscript, and questions from the authors.

When I finished transcribing all of the authors' edits, I went over my notes with Matt and finished up the remaining edits. One of the original editor's notes was about a "widow," a term that I was unfamiliar with before this internship. I learned that a "widow" is a single line of text at the end of a page (such as the beginning of a new paragraph that continues on the next page), and an "orphan" is a single line of text at the beginning of a page (the dangling end of a paragraph from a previous page).

During the fourth day of the internship, I learned about the new blog that FiT has recently created, www.thesportsiq.com. Aaron, my other supervisor, showed me the website and explained the style of the articles--off-beat, interesting material that isn't likely to be talked about in mainstream sports news. The new blog is less formal than the previous one, which included interviews and more in-depth analyses of sports news. He also explained which pictures are acceptable to use (about 540-550 X 750 pixels) and gave me a website that he and Matt typically use to obtain stock photos--Flickr's Creative Commons page. I was familiar with how to search for photos that we could use because Creative Commons was covered in my Multimedia Writing class last semester.

We also discussed "blurbs," the complimentary quotes on book jackets from notable sources. A book that FiT is publishing, called Boomercise: Exercising as You Age, is nearly completed, and FiT is beginning to look for notable people in the field who can contribute blurbs. For the remainder of my fourth day, I worked on a story for the blog about alcohol consumption at national sporting events and the possibility of WVU's allowing beer to be sold at university sporting events. I also drafted an email to send to prospective blurb contributors. Unfortunately, yesterday's storm caused the Coliseum's power to go out, and everyone went home early, so I was unable to complete the blog post or go over the blurb email with Aaron.

My next day is on Tuesday and I'm very excited to return. This internship is making me more and more sure that I've chosen a field that will interest me for years to come. In my next post, I'll talk more about the blog post, which I will have finished by then, and I'll provide a link to the story on FiT's blog. I'll also talk more about the responses we receive to the blurb emails (hopefully people actually respond) and any other work that I complete during the next few internship days.

Till next time,

Rachel