How the course has gone so far

On the 6th of February 2023, I started my journey as a student in the Professional Writing and Editing course. I have no interest in writing, but I do have a strong interest in editing. The first semester is complete and it has been quite a challenge. I had four classes, ‘Write Fiction Material,’ ‘Perform Writing and Editing Tasks,’ ‘Content Writing’ and ‘Implement Copyright Arrangement’. Fiction class was on Mondays at 9:30 in the morning, content was on Fridays at 11:30, WE was on Thursdays at 9:30 and copyright was also on Thursdays, but at 2:30. Those first three classes went for three hours each and copyright went for two, but lots of times we got through all the content and got to leave early.

The classes steadily got more intense as the term went on, the first few classes were mostly knowledge content, giving information that we would need before our first assessment and explaining how the classes will run and how to access and use our resources.

For me fiction went either way, sometimes I liked it, sometimes I hated it, but in the end it was the most satisfying class to complete. Every class has three assessments, in fiction the first was knowledge questions, the second was a piece of flash fiction and keeping a weekly writers journal for the first 10–12 weeks of class and the third was a short story of 2500–3000 words. The first assessment was pretty easy, the questions were all answered in class and if not they were easy questions to answer. The second assessment was harder, the flash fiction piece had to have a maximum of 600 words but the flash fiction and writers journal combined had to be 4000 words, it was very difficult to reach the word count. For both pieces of fiction we had to write I really struggled to start. Starting was the hardest part. The flash fiction was easier to write but harder to edit while the short story was harder to write and slightly easier to edit. In the end I was happy with how they all turned out.

Content completely different and challenging. The first assessment was also knowledge questions, but the second and third assessments were really hard. The second was writing five completely different pieces of content about one branch topic, it was really hard to include everything that the teacher wanted in the content. And the third assessment was to write plans for social media posts for the content we wrote. When I was doing that assessment though I thought I understood what I needed to do, but I got so confused when doing it, and it really stressed me out.

WE was over all around my favourite class, as I want to become an editor this class had what I wanted. The first assessment was stressful, especially for a first assessment. We had to write a 2500–3000-word persuasive piece. I was not happy with mine, but in the end it passed and did what it needed to. The second assessment was the best, it was in two parts, the first was proofreading and the second one was copyediting, although both assessments were group assessments and I didn’t like that very much, it was hard to coordinate the group so that all the mistakes we noticed were caught. The third assessment was knowledge questions, been there, done that.

Copyright had the same teacher as WE, she’s cool, all her classes were on the same day and she was funny. That class only had two assessments because it only started just before the easter holidays. The first one was…you guessed it, knowledge questions. The second one was a confusing group assessment. It was partially split into three parts, part a was called the manifesto even though it wasn’t really one, the second part was copyright scenarios, it is exactly what it sounds like, we had to answer those on our own, and the third part was called copyright notices and storage, that wasn’t what it sounds like. I was the final editor for parts a and c, so I ended up writing an email with the exact instructions of what we needed to submit. I was very proud of that email, and I don’t even know why. Our group was a mess when I went to start editing everything, I also went to make sure we had everything we needed to pass, but we were missing a few things so I had to write all those up, so some of it was unfamiliar to my group. But we finished it and I passed first go.

The classes are intense, the teachers are helpful when you actually ask for help and most of the students are easy to get along with. I’m not always enjoying it, but I’m not always hating it. So I am pretty happy with this course.

I’m ready for the next semester.

Bring it on.