Contributed by Lindsay Randall
A few weeks ago I began trekking down to Cambridge every Tuesday evening for the class Principles of Editing, offered through Harvard Extension School. I signed up for the class as I was looking for something that would help me to improve and polish our lesson booklets and other educational materials as we share them with the public. Christina Thompson, editor for the Harvard Review, has structured the class to teach lay people how to produce good, clean copy when editing material such as blogs, newsletters, websites, brochures, and other text.
Christina has a quirky personality one expects in a writer and the other adult students frequently use humor to make points about the homework. My type of people! The camaraderie in the class certainly makes the late nights enjoyable.
I am looking forward to learning more about editing and to see what other rousing debates we will engage in. (Last week was about when to use Em dashes and En dashes. WARNING: they can elicit strong – occasionally violent – emotions in individuals!)
