This week saw a lot of progress. Trish, Dr. Farless, and I met via zoom Monday night and reviewed our edits on the Pandemic paper, reviewed some questions we had on our new Victorian paper, and decided on our next edits. Furthermore, we were assigned some miscellaneous tasks to continue our education as editors.
Our pandemic paper edits went really smoothly. Dr. Farless agreed with a couple of my points, and I spent this past week reinforcing and tightening my edits based on her suggestions. For example, she agreed that the histography of the paper was a bit too long. This was an especially important deal because the paper needs to be cut by about 5 pages in order to meet the Florida Conference of Historians' guidelines. Now, I am tasked with suggesting specific pieces of historiography to either remove or direct to footnotes.
This was something I learned this week: If information is interesting but not vital to your point, it can be moved to the footnotes of your paper in order to save space. This is good to know as an editor because, in the case of papers like the Pandemic paper, sometimes we want the author’s hard work to be appreciated and kept in the paper, even if it does not fit within the paper itself.
Next, Trish and I asked Dr. Farless about some questions we have on our Victorian paper we had been assigned two weeks ago in our previous meeting. Last week, Trish and I met on our own to review our comments. In this meeting, we both agreed that there were some confusing points. For example, the paper’s use of Biography.com as a credible source. Dr. Farless agreed that this should not have been included and made a point to create a checklist for applicants to remove any improper our uncredible sources before submitting their paper. Our other questions on the use of Ibid in the footnotes an on the proper citations of pictures Dr. Farless is directing to the head of the Florida Conference of Historians.
Our final bit of our meeting Dr. Farless assigned us for our tasks in the next few weeks. This included editing another paper and reviewing citations on a paper that will be in the upcoming issue of the Florida Conference of Historians. I am excited to have more tasks this weekend, although I know that I will need to carefully schedule my time this weekend to get it all done, especially with Halloween this weekend.
Overall, I am excited for my upcoming meeting with Dr. Farless. I really loved editing this Victorian paper and had a lot of edits. I am excited to hear her thoughts on my ideas and learn about how to fix some of the more complicated issues. For example, the excessive use of passive voice in this paper will be a hard fix for the author. I will need to lean how ensure each usage is highlighted and communicated with the author for this to be completely fixed.