SA #3: My Editing Experience...

SA #3: My Editing Experience…

The original un-edited text, “Let Us All Bear Witness to the Conversation! How the Media-Political Class Ate the News this Summer” by Mark Leibovich, had major problems with clarity and organization of information. Most of the sentences lacked a professional tone and needed better explanation because they were hard to understand. Many of them included words that can be described as amateur. There was also a lot of information that strayed away from the main ideas of the text, such as interjections about national conversations concerning Presidents Obama, Bush, and Clinton. There was also an issue of organization of the information and there was no solid ending.

There are three general principles that guided me tremendously throughout my editing process. These principles come from Killingsworth's "Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America", Williams and Bizup’s Style, and Jones's "Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother With Logic?"

Killingsworth's ideas about information value and the concepts of news and human interest helped me greatly when putting myself in the shoes of the audience and their interpretation of information. Killingsworth writes, "For a story to be considered "news," it must tell readers something they don't already know, something they haven't already heard or become accustomed to" (Killingsworth 134). It was very clear to me that the idea of bearing witness is not one that is often discussed. During the editing process, I came to realize that the writer was arguing about a very relevant issue in society today. This helped me focus in on what the most important elements of the text were.

Williams and Bizup’s Style helped me considerably when addressing the original text’s cohesion and coherence. Style taught me to avoid using passive verbs, which I replaced out for active ones in the text. I implemented the tip “End sentences with information readers cannot predict” (Williams and Bizup 37) in my own way in the text. I included an open-ended question at the end because readers prefer to read the familiar and known first, and then move on to the unknown, and possible unanswerable. I also took into account the tip about coherence. I made sure that all the sentences in the text added to the main argument. I extracted the sentences that did not flow well. I did my best to make sure all the pieces fit to strengthen and illuminate the bigger idea.

Jones's description of inductive reasoning helped me formulate a plan for the reorganization of the text. "Inductive reasoning starts with a particular or local statement and moves to a more general conclusion" (Jones 164). This is exactly what I decided to do when editing the text. I placed the most particular information first, followed by broader statements that flowed into the conclusion.

There are three main changes I made to help the text regain balance. First, I reworded most of the sentences so that the main idea was clear. I omitted words that did not sound professional. I decided to change the title because I felt as though it did not do the text justice. It did nothing to inform the audience what the text was about prior to reading it. Finally, I changed around the order of some of the paragraphs, and even omitted a few of them. I did this in order to give the text a fuller, more symmetrical structure with a strong beginning and ending. I omitted some of the information because I felt as though it did nothing to strengthen the argument. I felt that certain information about the Clinton's and George W. Bush would confuse the audience and took the argument completely off track.

Liberties that I took in order to strengthen the complexity of the argument include changing many of the sentence's structures and words, changing the title so that it is more indicative of the information in the text, omitting certain information, and reorganizing the order of the paragraphs to enhance the clarity and balance of the argument.

There was an overall pattern of unclear language that I constantly had to correct. It was severe to the point that I had to completely restructure the majority of the sentences. I also noticed that most of the word choice was poor. Many of the words and phrases were not the best fit for the argument, and I substituted them out for descriptions that made the information easy to understand.

Short Assignment #3 made me discover that I'm very good at explaining concepts clearly and deciding what kind of information is valuable to an argument and what information is not. I also discovered that I'm fairly good at adding an element of symmetry to texts that I write and edit, for instance designing the ending of a text to mirror the beginning. I found that I'm also very good at organizing information in a clear, logical order. Something that I found was a struggle was not being well informed on the subject of the text I was editing. Perhaps if I had been more knowledgeable on the Ferguson controversy I would have had a little something more to add to the argument to give it some extra flair.