Tuesday, August 24, 2004

I looked up the word "at"

I had heard copy editing could do some pretty extreme things to a person, but if obsession was an Olympic sport, I blew away the old world record.
Yesterday was the first day of copy editing. And usually my experience around the journalism school consists of my day with work and battling it out with the copy machine, but yesterday my every thought was consumed with this class. Of course yesterday would be the one day I was late for class. I knew everyone would either sit up front and hang onto Mr. Fisher's every word, or they would all cower in the back. Everyone was upfront, so I had to walk past the entire class....late. Lecture actually went really well and my fears about the class started to ease. Lab was also great, I saw the mistakes in sentences before he pointed them out. (I also realized that when my previous editors and advisers just put a line through a word for it to be removed, they were using the wrong symbol.)
But I got home and started working on the lab homework. I have officially become obsessed with wanting everything in this class to be perfect. I can't find a symbol to delete multiple words, but also delete spaces. There is a symbol to delete multiple letters with no space, delete a word and leave space and delete a character and leave space on both sides. Short of just crossing out the two words, I don't know what to do, and I don't want to be wrong. I was also working on a sentence where I know at least one mistake existed, and I sensed there might be more, but I just could not figure it out. So I started looking up meanings of words, including "at." I thought maybe "on" should be used instead of "at." I learned that "at" gives a specific location, where "on" is more vague. I still can't find another problem, so I just gave up.
I know this assignment isn't even being graded, but the thought of failing this class is just annoying. I stressed over more issues on these sentneces, but I know that my mistakes will be pointed out and I will learn how to correct them in the future. I still can't believe I looked up the work "at" though. Oh yeah, Mr. Fisher's class isn't that intimidating yet, maybe it is just the work.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home