Why does a self-professed editor need an editing class?

I enrolled in the University of Chicago’s online professional learning certificate in editing. I wanted to hone my skills, it being some number of decades since I earned the college English degree. And I’m open to learning.

Know what? The first course has kicked my butt.

I’m pretty darn good at grammar, punctuation, spelling, even formatting. I can argue gerunds vs infinitives with the best of ‘em. But en dashes? I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had the em dash down okay, even forming it correctly ever since I started word processing. But the lowly en dash, which doesn’t even rate a main menu or shortcut hack—that I wasn’t so familiar with. Turns out that’s the dash you use between sets of numbers and dates. And my least known en dash function: following a prefix introducing an open compound word. (Say what?). Think pre—World War II. Yikes! I started this whole post about en dashes without knowing how to make one in SquareSpace!! brb. pre–World War II. There, that’s better. See the difference? – v. —. Your hyphen comes in at a -; not even close.

So anyway, en dashes – – – (now that I found one I want to keep pasting it in) were my first big surprise.

Another surprise is editing foreign language excerpts for English language audiences. That’s a thing. And a surprisingly hard thing to get right. The Chicago Manual of Style addresses several languages and the pitfalls thereof. CMOS is a thick book, though, with a ton o’ chapters, most of which I have read or skimmed during the past six weeks.

I finished the penultimate (good word) class tonight, so after next week I will be done with the basic manuscript editing class. (I refuse to capitalize that course name in a sentence.) In 2020 I’ll take intermediate editing, then editing electronically, and then a course in medical editing as an elective. I thought that would be interesting. It will be summer before I can take advanced editing. I’m hoping by then it seems a lot more old hat.

As this is my first E before I blog post, I will remark here that—much like first-year med students fearing they have contracted every infectious disease studied—I find that digging in and studying copyediting is a sure-fire way to second guess everything I write. So I’m giving myself permission not to sweat the blog too much. My best editing is for formal writing. Here, I’m getting thoughts on cyberpaper. I’ll probably have to repeat this to myself as a mantra.

Waddle on.