the internship, part seven or, the end

During my last month at the internship, a former classmate e-mailed me an essay he’d been working on. “Take a look at this,” he’d written. “Let me know what you think.” We’d become friends in a nonfiction writing class, one of the first graduate classes I’d taken. In that workshop, my classmates and I had written travel essays, exchanged them, and discussed them together. I’d since taken other workshop classes and even participated in a similar-style writer’s group, so I was familiar with evaluating others’ work. A funny thing happened when I read my friend’s piece, however: out of practice, I wasn’t noticing content as much as grammar.

When I’d read the newspaper, I’d involuntarily compare AP and Chicago Manual styles. Pronoun reference questions lingered in my mind after I’d edited a book where the author always used “their” to refer to each person.

My friend’s essay was about identity, using a physical object—his beard—for symbolism. But try as I might to focus on meaning and setting and other content-driven issues, my eyes kept catching on comma splices or pronoun-reference mistakes, things that I wouldn’t necessarily view as imperative to being a good writer. Feeling those modifications wouldn’t be especially helpful for him at that stage in the writing process, I shot him a quick “good job” email and didn’t criticize anything—not especially helpful, I’m sure. But that’s how life is, I think: the way you spend your days has to affect you. In my case, for five hundred hours, editing was my job; and I am different. I read differently, I write differently, I enjoy the process differently.

Filed under story of my internship |