Reflection 4

I'm back in the office at the Press now. Before I had been doing the library research and liked it a lot. I still went to the library at the same times I would be at the Press so I could keep up with my hours, and I would have taken forever with the project if I had taken time off. It was still nice to have a little freedom though; I could take a half hour off to do something else and then make it up at the end of the day by staying at the library an extra half hour. At first I was wishing for more library work, but now that I've gotten used to being there again, I really like it. Being at the library is somewhat lonely work and it's nice to be back in the office talking to everyone again.

Right now I'm doing basically the same thing I did over the summer, copyediting a book and paying special attention to getting the ciatation in the correct format. This one is a little more challenging because it's a book that is a collection of essays about the history of coal in West Virginia. All the author's have different styles and I have to find some consistent format to work wtih. For example, some spell out numbers under one hundred and some do not, some use WV and others use W.Va., and other small things that stand out when they keep switching back and forth. I thought I might be bored going back to copyediting but it's actually great because I can compare this book with the previous one I did. I'm much more confident on this one. I ask a lot less questions and make more decisions on my own. Before if Chicago didn't have a specific example on how to cite something, I would consult either Than, my boss, or Rachel, the grad student, on the best way to do it. Now I just pick something that I think will work. I'm also more organized this time around. I'm keeping a detailed style sheet, where last time I scribbled notes down in a notepad. Keeping the style sheet in a Word document allows me to rearrange it as I add things, where the notepad got sloppy and hard to use. I have spelling and hyphenation decisions on there, rules for the book like "use the serial comma," and examples of unusual citation styles, especially if I had to create them for the book. This was my biggest problem in the previous book. I wasted a lot of time relooking things up, and when I had to make things up, sometimes I forgot that I had created a method already and would create a new one for the second occurance.

I think I'll be back in the office working on this book for a while; it's pretty long. However, Than mentioned that there might be more work in fact checking journals soon. This seems like a good balance to me. I like the idea of switching on and off with jobs so I don't get too tired looking up Victorian poetry facts or reading about the history of coal mining. I should keep this in mind for future jobs. Maybe I'm a person that needs to have more than one project at a time so I can switch back and forth and not get burned out doing the same thing over and over.