Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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On copyediting
The teachers of your future copy editors e-mail each
other with ideas and tips; editors are invited to join in and write about
strengths and weaknesses
By Gene Foreman
College professors who teach editing courses have formed a loosely structured
organization to exchange ideas on how to train future copy editors. And
they want newspaper editors to join the conversation.
Frank E. Fee Jr. of Ohio University in Athens, put together the idea
exchange. At the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism
and Mass Communication last August in Baltimore, Fee asked editing teachers
to gather for shop talk. Two meetings were held, with about 15 people at
each. There was another meeting of 12 professors in September at the American
Copy Editors Society conference in Portland, Ore.
The professors wanted to keep the conversation going electronically
— that’s the way academics communicated long before editors discovered
e-mail. So he established a listserve called EDPROF-L.
Fee thinks the professors and editors should use the exchange to discuss
their common interests. “Real-world issues,” Fee says, are what this experiment
should be about. In setting up the listserve, he identified some topics:
What technology to teach? What to include in an editing curriculum? How
to interest students in editing and editing courses? Tips for more effective
teaching.
Responding to the invitation for real-world topics, David Craig of the
University of Oklahoma in Norman, wrote in an early posting: “I am particularly
interested in knowing what weaknesses supervising editors see in candidates
for copy desk jobs. Am I right that skills in grammar, punctuation and
usage are high on the list? What else is lacking?”
Fee plans to begin topics if they don’t appear spontaneously. The first
Fee-initiated topic evoked about a dozen contributions. He asked: Should
instructors use examples from campus newspapers to teach editing? While
acknowledging that this might damage student journalists’ fragile egos,
Fee wrote: “Some of the gaffes in news judgment, copy editing, headline
writing and layout and design offer a lot of teachable moments.”
Response was divided. Some responded that they found enough mistakes
in professional newspapers to use as examples and would rather not risk
offending students.
Andy Bechtel of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge noted that
after he offered extra credit to students who brought in newspaper examples
of common mistakes, students clipped many of these from the campus paper.
The paper’s managing editor, in a conversation with Bechtel, called his
training exercise “an extra-credit bounty hunt on our paper.”
Other professors thought the value of the teachable moments outweighed
the concern about sensitivity. There were reminders to balance negative
comments with positive ones.
Michael Roberts, training editor at The Cincinnati Enquirer, argued:
“Close-to-home examples represent real problems and real potential successes.”
Roberts said the professors should set a tone in which the purpose of improving
work is stressed, and the discussion is focused on the text, not on the
person who wrote it.
Fee invited professors to use the listserv to post their syllabi. These
postings should lead to further discussion, giving the professors a chance
to compare teaching approaches as well as appraisals of the different textbooks
and workbooks being used.
Like many college teachers of editing, Fee is a former practitioner.
He joined the Rochester Times-Union in 1976 and was in charge of copy desks
at the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle when he left for academia in 1995.
One of the first professionals chosen for a Freedom Forum program to train
college teachers, he studied for a doctorate for two years at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Then, with his Ph.D. dissertation remaining,
"I got a job." He took the three-year visiting professorship at Ohio University
in the fall of 1997.
Foreman, a longtime editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, is now a
distinguished professional-in-residence at the Penn State College of Communications.
