me :)
A picture of this year's AJC class being told "Okay guys, now do a silly one."
The 2022-2024 edition AP style guide I tabbed as a "going to J-school" present to myself.
editing
It took a while for the "editing" part of being an editor to grow on me. I'm good at grammar and spelling, but I was the type of student that would get tests back from teachers in elementary school with the note "remember to check your work" written on top. Once I'd finished something, my instinct had always been to hand it in and move on. Call a "never look back" attitude, call it then-undiagnosed ADHD, your choice.
Oddly enough, it was the breakneck speed at which AJC had me producing articles that taught me to slow down when it came to the editing stage. Once the "hard part" --- the interviewing, the researching, the writing --- was over, it was the copy editing that allowed you to savor what you'd written and take in every word one last time before publishing. Even outside of journalism, I've become the designated editor for my friends, providing feedback on all the college and scholarship application essays, term papers and drafts of important emails that get tossed in my direction.
portfolio "exams"
Rather than taking a final exam in AJC, the end of each semester brings another portfolio project. In these projects, we're tasked with selecting two pieces we've written that semester and revising them, then writing about why we chose to change what we did. We're expected to go beyond surface-level fixes like correcting AP style errors, instead revisiting the core concepts of our articles and thinking about how we could execute them better.
I've included a couple of examples of articles I've revisited as a part of these projects.
THE REVISION
If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.
THE REVISION
If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.
peer support
WRITING GROUP
While our portfolio projects allow us a chance to improve our work a few months after it's been published, writing group is a way for us to make our pieces better as they're being written. For every week that we post a Tiger Times Online article on Friday, part of the class time on Wednesday is devoted to letting us sit in groups, read our pieces aloud to our classmates and receive feedback from each other.
I became extremely close with my writing group last year, and the feedback we gave each other helped produce work that I'm still incredibly proud of a year later. Though I wish I had evidence of the extensive notes I'd write on their pieces, we would almost always give our notes back to the writer after writing group was over. That incredibly detailed feedback will have to live on as a memory of our writing group taking so long to finish critiquing our pieces that the rest of our classmates thought we had to have gotten off-topic, I guess because it seemed unbelievable that someone could talk for that long about copy editing.
When drafts of The Claw are due, we still do writing group, but with a twist: instead of having your piece read by your members of your three-or-four-person group, the entire class will pass around their pieces to receive comments from each of their classmates. Each person in the rotation is tasked with looking for one thing in the piece, like AP style errors, correct attribution or transition quality. While it can be difficult to focus on just one aspect of each piece while editing, it helps me train my brain to catch all of those little details when I'm getting ready to publish a piece.
ALWAYS ACCESSIBLE
As I mentioned in the "team-building" portion of my leadership page, my peers in AJC and yearbook can reach me via GroupMe any time. I've provided a handful of examples of my AJC classmates reaching out to me, and my responses.
Some of the screenshots might be cut off by the shape of the gallery, but you can see the full image by clicking on it.
One thing I've had to deal with, especially in my second year of AJC, is having a few of my personal friends in the class. I've had to balance being an editor and being a peer, which can be difficult at times, like when a Claw deadline aligns with a senior skip day and I know some of my classmates are behind on production. While I don't personally participate in skip days, I knew some of my classmates would, so I wanted to let them know what they'd need to do if they wanted to take part in the day while still getting our issue out by our extremely narrow deadline.