A Learning Process

Hi VIU! It’s been awhile. Between school and work and everything else, things have been hectic—but I’m still around. I’ve been having a great (and slightly crazy) semester now that I’m in upper level. One of the best things about my schooling this year is that through a couple of my courses I’m getting some real-world experience in an area that I’m thinking about pursuing a career in: editing. It’s one thing to learn the job in the classroom, but another entirely to put it in to practice for a published magazine. That’s what I’m currently working on as senior copyeditor for VIU’s literary magazine, Portal (which you should all read). It’s a job that was assigned to me back in the fall and I thought, “Hey, that’s awhile off, no worries. I don’t need to learn how to identify comma splices quite yet.” Well, time flies, and here I am with a week and a half to do the job asking myself, “So, what does a comma do exactly?” Okay, perhaps I’m not that amateur, but working a project where the 750 copies of the results are available to the public does cause me to question my abilities—I’ve had comma splice and grammatical criticisms regarding entries on this blog, after all. But the thing to remember is that this is an education—a learning process, where not everything is going to be perfect the first time. And it’s kinda more fun that way.

Kaitlyn