This unit was the hardest for me of the four and made the semester twice as difficult as the previous two. I tend to do a lot better when it comes to the creative part of writing than with the theory/formal (editing etc.) side of it. It’s always been that way. In highschool I would get 15/15 for creative writing components of exams and then get 11/15 for comprehension. And so, Editing and Developing the Manuscript felt like a personally tailored nightmare. By the fourth week I felt like I’d dropped the ball, but by week five I felt like I’d never had the ball to begin with. The experience was a mixture of frustration and being disheartened. It was a different type of learning experience. I don’t think I learned as much as I could but at the same time I know it was a valuable learning experience, both in content and the way I handled it.

The most difficult part of the class was always feeling inadequate. I missed a lot of schooling and so there are a lot of foundations that I’m missing when it comes to education. It’s in every subject and I’ve found it difficult to try and learn those things as I am now. It’s like I can’t absorb anything anymore. And so my English skills like grammar are limited. Almost every tutorial I had I was sitting there unable to follow what everyone else was talking about. There were a lot of times where I would just stare at the board thinking “what the f*ck?”. I had to do a lot of googling and flipping through my writing textbooks to follow the lessons, even after reading the lecture slides. I seem to have this issue where something needs to be taught to me in a specific way. If I can get that one good example that sums up the concept, then it all clicks into place, but if not, then I often have trouble understanding, identifying and utilising said concept.

Since doing editing assignments in the first year, I’ve become confident in my editing skills, and even more so after this course. I’ve found that my editing of my own work has significantly improved, so much so that I can’t even remember if I actually edited my work before now. In my feedback for AT2, my tutor remarked that my copy-edit is clean and they can see that my editing skills are good but I’m not actually expanding on my reasoning for intervention and my suggestions for intervention. I equate it to the bane of mathematics marking where you lose points for “not show working out”. But even though I cried when hearing the feedback and looking at the grade for that assignment, I plan on utilising the feedback to improve. That’s the point of learning, right?

There were three assignments for this course:

1. Manuscript Appraisal
2. Peer-to-Author Edit and Reflective Essay
3. Exam (composed of multiple choice and a proof-reading of a document)

I received, what I believe/ed to be sub-par results on the first two. I fared significantly better on the final exam but I feel that the first two were a lot more important to have done well in.

Assessment Task 1: Manuscript Appraisal

I felt that I had done well on this assignment but did very average. One of the main components of this assignment was to correctly identify a suitable publication. There were three potential but one was the ‘for sure’ publication. I got so in my head about this and wrote up a list to work my way down to one by process of elimination based on their submission guidelines and specifics. But I did that thing where you doubt yourself, change your answer and then get it wrong.

The manuscript appraisal was an interesting process but it wasn’t something I thoroughly enjoyed. Meaning: I much prefer to write and edit my own work than to appraise and edit the work of others. But that’s also probably due to my poor results. I do prefer writing my own stories to reading the stories of others though.

Assessment Task 2: Peer-to-Author Edit and Reflective Essay

I got off to a bumpy start to this assignment because I fell sick a lot at the beginning of this year. The idea was to critique someone’s manuscript and have your manuscript critiqued and practice the process between author and editor. My partner and I were unsure on how formal we had to be and how far we had to edit/intervene in the editing process. The reflective part was hard because I didn’t feel like I’d done enough and having had such a poor score on my first assignment didn’t help. It turns out I was right about my gut feeling though. I should have done a lot more than what I did do. I’m not entirely sure how I should have done this but it was the main component of the feedback. I wasn’t sure how specific I was to be with interventions and I think I focused too hard on trying to separate subjectivity and objectivity. I didn’t want how I felt about the piece to influence my editing of it but at the same time, I think I spent way too much time worrying about that.

Assessment Task 3: Exam

The final assessment task was an exam. The first half of it was a multiple choice test and the second half was a document that we had to proof-read. I did well in the first half and not as well as I thought I did in the second half. It was the best mark that I had for the course. Even though it was a good mark, I wish it had been better. Literally just because it would have put my grade for the course up.

Safe to say, I won’t be posting any of the work from this course on here.