Tara's Editing Experience

I’ve always had an eye for detail, so editing usually comes naturally for me. I can usually pick out the small details like missing capitalization or punctuation, but it doesn’t always go so smoothly. Last year, I was the copy editor for a different literary magazine, which meant I was responsible for proofreading the entire journal by myself. All was going well, I had finished editing it fairly quickly, until I returned the next day to find that the entire file had been corrupted. Which meant I had to re-edit the entire thing, and we were running out of time before we had to get the journal to our printer. As I went through editing the journal once again, I found that the file corrupting may have been a blessing rather than a curse. It allowed me to go back through and find mistakes that I didn’t catch the first time, as well as give more thought as to why I was making the edits I was making, and gave me a lesson in making the best of a bad situation.