Editing
Feedback, Copy Edits, Layouts, and Style Guides
Copyedits and InDesign
2024-2025
Quills & Pixels, the nonfiction magazine run through UALR, was a unique experience because it was both a college course and a magazine staff. Our fall class, Editing for Publication, primarily focused on soliciting and gathering submissions, and then developmentally editing and providing individual feedback to the writers whose work we selected. Our spring class, Production Editing, was more technical, mastering the basics of InDesign to create layouts for the pieces we had chosen in the fall.
This offered me the best of both worlds; one semester allowed me to jump back into the peer review and workshopping I'd loved in undergrad, while the other provided ample opportunity to practice graphic design and close copyediting, per the Chicago Manual of Style.
The most memorable and perhaps most challenging aspect of Quills & Pixels was the fact that our own work was reviewed and edited amongst ourselves. The Q&P staff freely engaged in dialogue over anonymous work without knowing whether a staff member had written it. The experience taught a lot of us about respect—handling each piece with care and recognizing the efforts that had gone into it, while still encouraging edits to ensure the work was at its best.
Style Guides
2024
I created a comprehensive style guide for my client “Be Mighty,” a hunger relief campaign that is affiliated with the Central Arkansas Library System.
The experience was formative as I learned how to create a visually appealing and easily readable style guide. My goal was to design something that emphasized the importance of Be Mighty’s social media presence, but still maintained accessible information so that an older or less tech-experienced person could utilize the guide. I also wanted to ensure a baseline for the proper terminology to be used by all employees (i.e. "unhoused" instead of "homeless").
Developmental Edits
2021-2023
My love for writing and editing persevered between undergrad and graduate school. I worked on several independent projects with friends and fellow writers, offering feedback and helping edit fiction and nonfiction pieces for cohesion. This was one clear example of the passion we all shared outside of academic responsibility; we were simply recent graduates in a post-pandemic era who loved to write.
Leadership and Coordination
2018-2020
Perhaps one of my greatest challenges in undergrad was stepping (or rather being thrust) into the position of Editor in Chief of Hendrix College's literary magazine Aonian. When the initial EIC disappeared, and the Associate Editor frustratedly handed me the office key and quit, a handful of other previous staff members were left standing. We quickly formed a team and met with our faculty advisor to get started on the work a bit later than usual in the semester. Covid hit one week later.
As big of a learning curve as it was, we adjusted to remote coordination, and though a print publication was not possible at the time, we managed to create and design the first online version of Aonian. Other responsibilities at the time included:
- coordinating the annual Aonian Writing Contest (judged by authors such as Kevin Brockmeier and Nickole Brown)
- designing the Wordpress site that would host our digital publication
- engaging in online and radio interviews to promote the publication
- communicating with the rest of the staff to finalize the product
- hosting the nontraditional Zoom version of our first reading
Workshopping and Peer Review
2016-Present
Workshops were great opportunities to get students out of their comfort zone. They allowed me to practice giving feedback, but more importantly to practice receiving it. They encouraged bravery and acceptance of criticism. My professors, who were excellent mediators, and my peers, who joined me in my vulnerability, ultimately created both a safe and constructive space that first started me down the path of collaborative editing.
My most rewarding memory comes from an undergraduate fiction writing class, in which I had written a piece featuring a morally gray character. The class went back and forth on the character's motives; some sided with her, some against. The divisiveness was just what I'd hoped for, and solicited the response I'd wanted.