What: I performed substantive edits and copyedits on lesson content for an online personal finance course for high school students.

Where: I edited this course while working as team lead for BYU Continuing Education’s editing team.

Why: This course was a tricky project because the author we contracted turned out to be a poor writer. The instructional designer over the course gave me free reign to reword, restructure, or even entirely rewrite sections as needed. My edits focused mainly on clarifying meaning, adding detail, and rewriting awkward phraseology.

I have the permissions of BYU Continuing Education to use this sample.

What: I performed substantive edits and copyedits on the lesson introductions for an online Writing Within Psychology course.

Where: I edited this course while working as an editorial assistant for BYU Continuing Education’s editing team.

Why: The content for this course was heavily infected with “academese”: overblown expression, rambling sentences, nominalizations, and opaque prose. In my edits, I had to strike a balance between promoting clarity, preserving the author’s tone, and modeling principles of good writing (since this was, after all, a course on writing clearly!)

I have the permissions of BYU Continuing Education to use this sample.

What: I performed substantive edits and copyedits on an in-house style guide prepared for an organization called Rising Star Outreach.

Where: The style guide was prepared by a team of three classmates in my copyediting class at Brigham Young University.

Why: This document had been prepared by a team of four different editors, and each had a different writing style and adhered to slightly different style standards. In my edits, I focused heavily on promoting consistent formatting and wording. Many of my edits also focused on concision. Since this document was a style guide, I also flagged guidelines or examples that I felt broke basic editorial principles.

I have the authors’ permissions to use this sample in my portfolio.

What: I performed developmental and substantive edits on the first draft of a linguistic research project report.

Where: The report, and my editing of it, were both assignments in my copyediting class at Brigham Young University.

Why: This sample demonstrates my ability to (1) edit in hard copy using proper copyediting markup, (2) give praise as well as constructive feedback, and (3) critique the logic, organization, and contents of a document.

I have the author’s permission to use this sample in my portfolio.