To see additional editing samples, visit the Editing Samples page.
The following style guides are drafts that were given to me to edit; they were written for the ELang 350 copyediting class.
Sabu Help International
The first style guide was written for Sabu Help International, a Salt Lake City-based nonprofit organization that helps people find opportunities to improve their lives "through small loans, skill training, and educational aid." This guide is intended to assist Sabu Help International in becoming more accessible to a global audience by providing guidelines they can follow to maintain consistency and increase clarity in their writing.
My edits for this style guide were focused on improving organization of the guide to eliminate confusion and making explanations of the provided guidelines easier to understand. The author chose relevant items to focus on and examples that made the point she was trying to make very clear. The style guide was a basic draft when it was sent to me, so the document was incomplete; the last three pages are more lightly edited to account for the incompleteness.
Security National Master Holding Company, LLC
This style guide was written for Security National Master Holding Company (SN), which is a privately owned national company focused on "loan acquisition, loan servicing, and real estate investment." This guide is meant to provide a means by which SN employees can make consistent decisions in communication between the company and its clients.
The author of this guide was very thoughtful in her decisions and wanted to be very clear in her explanations about why the choices she made were important. Because in some cases that started to distract from the purpose of the guide, I focused my editing on eliminating wordiness and maintaining consistency, which was a fairly prominent issue, though it was what the guide was hoping to encourage. This guide was also incomplete when the draft was provided for me to edit, so the final three pages are more lightly edited.
Personal Response Paper
The following personal response paper is a draft that was given to me to edit; it was written for the ELang 350 copyediting class.
"The Democratic Spirit of Modern American Usage"
This essay was written to explain to university students and potential employers the author's thoughts about the importance of and differences between prescriptivism and descriptivism in editing. She responded to a prompt that asked for her view about the topic, why she came to that decision, and how her experiences related and added to her thoughts.
My editing for this draft was more substantive than in any other edits for this class; the author had a solid grasp on copyediting and the changes I made were mostly intended to improve clarity for the reader. There were instances in which her tone was inconsistent or unintentionally inappropriate for the audience and prompt given. I made suggestions about choosing words carefully and making sure that her opinions were not stated as irrefutable facts.