The first week back with all the faculty and students was, in a word, chaotic. It was exhausting just trying to keep up with all the people and I still had to go to classes.
This semester I have two classes Manuscript Editing and Topics in Technical Writing – Grant Writing. The Grant Writing class is interesting and I’m excited for. The Manuscript Editing class is a lot of technique I think – grammar, punctuation, and technical information. I think I will learn some from it but I’ll see how I feel about it as the class goes on. After class on Tuesday, I’m going to have a conversation with the instructor to see how things go.
Being a non-traditional student, I fall outside the norm in most things and I think this will be another class where that is the case. I’ll see how it goes and hopefully it will help me be a better editor.
The interesting thing is I’ve always said I don’t want to master anything but as I do more of the editing I find I do want to master this. Is there a master’s degree down the line for me? I don’t know. I know that I enjoy – yup I said enjoy – learning about the grammatical part of writing.
For me, though, I have to be careful about becoming too technically correct in my writing (for fiction) because when you are extremely proper in your writing it sounds very formal. This makes it less reader friendly.
It is a matter of balancing things. For the articles and non-fiction writing I want that correctness and formality but for fiction I want it more reader friendly. Focusing on the end product is key and that will help me produce the best possible product.