My time at FiT since my last post has been hectic and full of exciting new tasks and projects. I finished the blog post that I mentioned in my last entry here, and it's been posted to the FiT blog. Writing the post helped me to understand journalistic writing and how it differs from other styles. I've never taken a journalism class (unless we're counting Yearbook in high school), so it's a challenge to switch to a less formal style. I'm not entirely satisfied with the first post, but I had a chance to try again with a new post, and I'm much happier with the results. The second post I wrote is called "The Moneyball Revolution." It deals with the new sports movie, Moneyball, which is being released soon. It's based on a book about the sabermetric approach to sports recruiting and how the approach contributed to the success of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. I feel that this post is much more 'journalistic' in tone than the first one, although I would still like to improve with the next one that I write. I also like this post more because it required much less editing, and I posted it myself, including the video and photo. I was also able to learn about WordPress, which I'd never used before.
This time has also been exciting because I was given my first few 'major' projects, one of which is now completed. I was asked to write an index for a new book, Boomercise: Exercising as You Age. I'd never worked on an index before, so Matt and I had a conversation about the basics, and I read the Chicago Manual chapter on indexing before I started the project. I've used a lot of indexes, but I never appreciated how challenging it can be to compose one. There are so many things to take into consideration: When a particular term is mentioned in the text, is it discussed at enough length to warrant mentioning in the index? What terms will the intended audience be most likely to look up--the official term or a more informal term? What subjects will the intended audience want to quickly reference? I actually liked the project more than I thought I would. It took a long time to complete, but it was fun to learn about the formatting of an index, which is surprisingly specific. There are more ways to format one than I knew about, and I enjoyed learning about FiT's style. The most interesting tip I learned was that using too many tabs can create problems for the typesetter because they have to delete excessive spaces and tabs to make sure that everything lines up when the book is printed.
I'm currently proofreading a book on sport financing, a compilation of 28 articles on the subject. I'm about 100 pages into the 400-page manuscript, and when I finish proofreading it, I'll begin creating its index. The entire project has to be finished by the end of this month, but I hope to have it finished within the next couple of weeks so that I can make some progress on the third project, a 460-page book that needs to be copy edited. I'm definitely looking forward to continuing my work on both of these projects--this internship is continuously confirming to me that this career path was the perfect choice.
I'll write more about the smaller, but equally valuable projects that I've been working on, as well as some fun information I've learned about the publishing process.
~Rachel
You've written another good post here, one filled with lots of descriptive details about the work you've been doing. I have a few questions for you to consider as you compose the reflective components for your portfolio:
ReplyDelete(1) You explain that your second blog post was much more "journalistic in tone" than your first post. What are some specific word choices, sentence styles, topic decisions, etc., that created this difference in tone? Why does the journalistic tone seem to be more important to create for the blog than the academic tone cast in the journal articles and textbooks you've been editing?
(2) I'm so interested in hearing about your work indexing because I need to create one for a book that I'm publishing with Southern Illinois University Press! What are some key things that you learned through the process of creating the index? In what ways did your experience confirm what you learned in the Chicago Manual, and in what ways did your experience run counter to the manual? That is, when did your common sense understanding of how to create the index run counter to what the manual suggests that you do?
(3) What are you learning about copyediting such extensive documents like 400+ page book manuscripts? What are the challenges of working with such a large text? What strategies are you learning in order to deal with these challenges?