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I have been interested to see, as of late, how my new job as assistant copy editor at the school paper has affected my writing. In fact, since I got the job I haven’t written anything up until last week. I had to write a poetry explication/analysis on the poet/poem of my choice for my Romantic Literature class (ENG 480). After reading “The Human Abstract” by William Blake about 10 or more times, and making my usual outline, I typed out four pages in about two hours with no problem.

We were required to print out two copies of our paper to be distributed in class for peer editing. As I read two other papers in class I felt assured that I had an equal, if not slightly more stable draft than I had previously thought. Later that night, when I sat down to review what my classmates had edited I noticed some startling comments.

To my horror, I read such disheartening comments as “You have some serious punctuation problems” and “too many run-on sentences.” I was offended and befuddled. However, as I read over their corrections, I realized my mistake. I had written the paper completely in AP style. Somehow, my brain disregarded the 23-years-worth of English grammar and converted to this strange­—but ultimately and unarguably more efficient style of writing.

Though I have only been assistant copy editor for about five weeks, I feel that I am not learning AP style as fast as I should. When I edit an article and pass it on to the copy editor, I notice that her red marks far outnumber mine. I ask her a lot of questions and refer to my stylebook often, but plenty of mistakes still elude me.

Working for a college newspaper, especially one that only publishes once a week has slightly deterred me from ever wanting to work for a daily paper. First of all, most writers are terribly unorganized. No one seems to conform to a specific style (AP included) and many people make the same mistakes over and over regardless of my written comments on their drafts.

For example, when an English major like myself uses commas in a series – such as red, white, and blue – the comma is naturally placed between white and and. However, in AP style, the series simply reads red, white and blue with only one comma. Half the writers recognize this rule and some even insist on using the ampersand (the symbol &) in place of and. This is another huge no-no unless the ampersand is part of a company name such as Proctor & Gamble.

Another common mistake is with numerals. In accordance with AP style, cardinal numbers 0-9 should almost always be spelled out zero-nine. Anything above 10, unless it is a date or is at the beginning of a sentence, should be written as a numeral. Nine out of 10 people don’t adhere to this rule.

Deadlines are another thing the staff seems to extravagantly disregard. I go to the office at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday. I usually leave around midnight. In that amount of time I have only done about two hours of editing. The rest of the time I sit around doing homework, waiting on people to drop their articles in the *2beEdited network folder.

When I go back on Wednesday afternoon, people are running around franticly trying to get their articles edited all at once to make the 3 p.m. deadline. I realize the staff is 99 percent college students and that everyone procrastinates. I do however think if the deadline were more strictly enforced, everyone (including the editors) would be a lot better off. I haven’t decided if I want to continue working at the paper next semester, but if it’s more organized under the new adviser, I may consider it a little more strongly.

Definitely though, the experience alone has been worth it. I’ve never much liked working with groups of people, and now I remember why. But, most of the people are all civil and interesting. Several of the staff are smokers and we take full advantage of our unlimited smoke breaks. Also, every computer in the office is a Mac, which I had no prior experience with before this year. I actually heard myself say the common phrase uttered by most Americans over 50 in response to computers, “I can’t even turn one on.”