Editing

With my team, I copyedited fifteen student essays for Starting Lines, an anthology of student writing intended to be used as a pedagogical text in Writing 1 and Writing 2 classes. I edited approximately twenty pages a week across three rounds of revisions. Our edits were primarily mechanical in nature, as we sought to preserve the voices of the original authors and minimize the level of intrusiveness of editing. We also cross-checked references and quotations, selected pull quotes, and determined the order of the anthology.

Starting Lines will be published in Fall 2025, so I don’t have access to the typeset version yet, but I will include three before-and-afters of our work. For the first two pieces, I did the first pass of copyedits, while for the last one I did the second round, as well as a heavy-duty reference check.

Internal Criticism: Pricila Garcia Diaz

Finding Your Identity Through Writing: Mia Sevilla

Rise of the Environmental Movement at UCSB: Nikolina Mancinelli

I took on duties as lead copyeditor of Spectrum Literary Journal, the official literary journal of the College of Creative Studies at UCSB. Across three rounds of revisions, we edited six prose pieces and twenty poems. Our edits were primarily mechanical, with some stylistic and content considerations queried to the authors. I also served as Marketing and Communications Editor.

Volume 68 of Spectrum Literary Journal is available in print. Check out the website here: https://spectrum.ccs.ucsb.edu/about-us

Here is one example of the before/after editing that I did as lead copyeditor. Note the usage of queries.

Anna Williams: House of Mirrors

For my Professional Editing Minor, I took two capstone courses: WRIT 151A (Copyediting) and WRIT 151B (Style and Usage). We practiced copyediting, fact-checking, style edits, and author’s notes.

On one occasion, we had to give feedback to an established author’s published short story. Here is my letter that I wrote to Mary Gaitskill for my suggestions to her story “Today I’m Yours:”