Reflecting on Arctic Spas

 I believe my strengths as an Editor lies in my knowledge, practice, and experience with grammar. I was the Editor-in-Chief of my high school newspaper and one of my favorite tasks was line editing the proofs. During my time in college I put the knowledge I gained before to use during two internships at public relations firms where I was responsible largely for copy editing content both in print and online form. This helped continue and improve my grammar skills and this is the area I feel most confident in editing. My weakest area as an editor, however, would have to be my reluctance to cut down on text. I feel a pang of guilt erasing sentences or rewording them because I feel as though I am taking away from the writer instead of improving it. I did the best of my editing abilities to edit the Artic Spas Wikipedia article, which was flagged to be edited for grammar, spelling, style, cohesion, and tone. I found all these issues present as well as missing citations – but I was unaware of how to fix this so I focused solely on the items listed above.

I used the principles of the period and comma outlined in the WWC chapter, “Punctuation: Graceful Movements, Confident Stops.” There were several examples in the text that needed proper usage of a comma or a period in order to improve the total cohesiveness of the text. This was evident from the start of the article in its introductory paragraph.

The original sentences stated: “The entrepreneur's continued to lose money until 1997, when the company was sold to the present owners, all of whom had previously been involved as dealers selling the product.”

My edited version states: “The entrepreneurs continued to lose money until 1997, at which point the company was sold. It was bought by the current owners, who all had been involved as dealers and in selling the product previously.”

The second version solves two issues that the first creates through the redundancy of the use of the comma. The first sentence reads awkwardly with the use of the comma, which is used improperly. Splitting the sentence into two allows for a confident stop as discussed in the WWC. Additionally there is a better sense of cohesion in the text by creating two sentences. The end of the first sentence tells the reader the company was sold, and the start of the new sentence tells the reader who bought it out and how they were involved with the company beforehand. It gives the information into digestible bits to the reader this way.

This short article suffered only few other mistakes as large as the one mentioned above but a few quick fixes cleared up the issues in style, cohesion, tone, and grammar. To view the entire article prior to my edits, click here.