Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

It’s been a good 20 years since I went to university, so it has been an interesting experience doing a post-graduate certificate in Professional Writing (Editing) and the University of Canberra. For me it has been like putting my toe in the water, seeing whether me and study mix.

The first subject was Introduction to Editing. No real choice here as there are only 4 subjects all told. I guess if I like the certificate I can try for the Graduate Diploma and then maybe a Masters. It really depends what I can get out of it and the cost, of course. Not cheap to do post graduate study.

The certificate will be useful for work. I write reports but also edit them. I could, in theory, help out with editing other reports when required. Mind you audit reports well they are not much fun and do take a lot to write and edit.

Next semester is Advanced Editing and requires a decent-sized editing project from start to finish. I’m still trying to figure out what I would like to do. I think I’d like to do fiction.

So this course has been interesting. Some parts were easy for me. I’ve edited a couple of collections, an anthology and a novel. I’ve laid out books, organised printing and launched them. So I have a bit of grounding in the industry and the course covered some of that. We covered substantive editing, copy editing and proofreading. We covered the various roles of the publishing team and freelance editing. We had editing exercises, some of which were challenging. Most of them were very interesting in that we had to think about what the text was to convey.

I found the major assignment tough. It was an editing project with a couple of written pieces such as the letter to the publisher with the approach and thoughts on the work to be done and a letter to the author as well as the mark up of the piece. The other exercise was developing a style guide. I chose Hammer and Bolter, the Black Library’s ezine. That was kind of cool and the class really responded well to the presentation.

Today we had the final exam. I thought it was reasonably tough, mostly because it was not what I was expecting. I had been swatting hyphens and correct words and grammar and there wasn’t any of that. I forgot to mention about the enforcement of the style guide in the answer to what is copy editing. Darn it. Very important thing to miss out, seeing half the learning was about that. I completed the test with some time to go over a few things and pick up more proofreading bits and reorganise the mark up on the major piece in the exam.

I think I passed the test. Of course I’m hoping I aced it but you know…I have to wait and see. My marks so far have been good. I do know that I have issues with proofreading. I lost marks in my assignments for stupid errors I made and didn’t pick up when I did my read through.

I’m free now to write, read, knit and veg in front of DVDs, well until next semester. Look out revision because here I come.