Reflection 1

I made my first big mistake at my internship last week, so I thought it would be a good thing to write about for my first blog. I’m an editing intern at the WVU Press and for the majority of the summer I was copyediting a book about the career of a West Virginia governor, William Glasscock. Last week I began to learn how to bring the Word files into InDesign, the software the Press uses to layout and do final editing of the books they publish. I was very excited to do this because InDesign is something that I will need to learn to use for a career in editing. On Monday I was doing very basic things like creating new files, creating pages in the files to hold all of the text, and saving each chapter into a book document. I kept asking questions to make sure I was doing everything right because InDesign has so many features and buttons that it was hard to keep track of everything I was doing. Then it came time on Wednesday to apply styles. Applying a style to every paragraph and character in the document is important I learned, because later, when changes need to be made all similar things are labeled and treated the same way. So after I label all the footnotes “footnote text,” I can then decide I want everything in footnote text to be size 9 instead of 9.5 and apply it without having to change every individual footnote.

While I was applying these styles I noticed that some would get labeled “footnote text” or “body text” like they were supposed to, but others would get labeled “footnote text+” or “body text+” for no apparent reason. I couldn’t see any difference in the text, and since I had already asked so many questions, I decided just to keep going. After labeling everything (about a four hour job), I noticed that about 50% of the text was in the wrong font and that coincidentally all that text had the mysterious plus sign attached. After reluctantly notifying my boss, we realized that in switching everything back I would have to go through this long 6 step process for every chapter in order to get everything back to normal without deleting all the special characters like italics and superscripts. That was a long description of my mistake, but I can’t think of a less complicated way to say it and still get across what I did.

I learned last week that the technology used to publish books is helpful but complicated, and I can’t be expected to learn everything in one day. When figuring out the process for correcting my error, even my boss didn’t know everything I should do, and he told me to go online and find out how. While I was searching for answers, I kept typing actual questions into Google because I couldn’t think of how to solve my problem except to ask directly. It was then I realized the using the internet, a book, or any other tool is just like asking for help. I shouldn’t be afraid to use any of those sources as I’m learning at my internship. A combination of asking questions and searching online helped me figure out this problem. I’ve never been a big fan of learning by making mistakes, but this mistake made me realize that it’s possible to learn quite a bit that way. Of course I’m not going to go out of my way to make mistakes so that I can learn, but I won’t be so upset next time. Hopefully I can recognize it as a way to learn something that I never would have learned otherwise.