Victoria Faraon
These last two weeks have been pretty eventful: I have officially proofread and edited my first article! Olivia Ivings attached the introduction to the issue we are putting together into the Trello on Thursday, September 26th. My deadline to complete this article was Friday, October 4th. The article’s content was approximately nine pages long with five notes and nineteen citations.
Since one of my main jobs is to ensure that the citations abide by the MLA 9th ed. Handbook rules, I had to look up many nuances in the citations I was presented with. On a basic level, I corrected missing commas, capitalization errors, and overall formatting. However, a few more complex issues arose when I began locating and fact-checking these sources.
Since the topic of our issue is one I am not very familiar with, I am equally not as knowledgeable of the professionals in this field of study. In one case, I had an author with a name change, and in another, I had an author who utilized their full name and nickname for different works. For the instance regarding the name change, I offered the second name in brackets following the first “published” name. Similarly, for the works made by the same person and published under their first name and nickname, I included brackets following the second work reading: “[published as ‘full name’]”. Both of these corrections were offered by the MLA 9th ed. Handbook and I made my best judgment on what formatting worked best in my particular case.
Locating these sources online also proved to be quite a hassle. I had to ensure the dates, publisher, and authors were correctly listed. Some sources were missing citation information and a few sources were incorrectly titled or dated. Certain publishers were questionable during my search, so I queried the authors to verify the publisher was correct.
Additionally, I fact-checked every quote I could find, guaranteeing they were properly cited. I found three quotes/page numbers that weren’t entirely accurate, and I was able to query the authors to double-check their copy. I queried three sources that weren’t referenced at all in the text as well.
I completed light editing when it came to the content of the article. Olivia mentioned earlier this semester that language editing would be minimal and that I should instead focus on the grammar/clarity of the article. I added a few commas and em dashes, and I queried sentences I thought were particularly unclear or clunky while reading.
One thing I completely underestimated during this process was the amount of time I’d spend proofreading and editing this article. The entire process took a collective twelve hours over about a week. Most of my time was spent double and triple checking my edits and physically flipping through the MLA 9th ed. Handbook. I’m sure that once I become more familiar with the common citation mistakes authors make, I will be able to quicken this process. Fact-checking and source-locating will probably remain the same, though I now have some sites to use to find these sources!
All this to say, I was very excited to receive my first article. This is the first time I have done something like this outside of the classroom, and I am already looking forward to my next one this week!
