Graduate Editing Class Looking for Clients

This spring semester, assistant professor Adam R. Pope's graduate course in the technical writing graduate certificate is covering editing and design for publication, and the course's student editors are in need of some clients to work with during the course of the semester. 

"Teaching editing to students can be challenging," explained Pope, "because a good editor needs to be trained on real-world texts with the types of mistakes that find their way into authors' work over time. You can create sample texts for editing, and those can be beneficial, but nothing helps build an editor's ability and sense for working on a text like a real client's project." 

For the spring semester, Pope is looking for academic articles and proposals that are in need of copy editing services. The first three to six documents that are submitted that fit the requirements will be used in the course as whole-class assignments. Once the class is done editing the text working alongside Pope on the project, the final text with suggested edits will be returned to the clients.

No costs are associated with the edit, and the overall ediitng timeline will depend on when the text is slotted into the course calendar. Texts that would be suitable include those that need a copy edit for grammar, style adherence and overall length, as well as one to two texts that need a more comprehensive edit to suggest cuts and additions. Any texts should be complete documents and fall under 60 pages in length, with an ideal length falling between 10 and 30 pages. All clients should be faculty, staff or students at the U of A. Academic prose and proposals, as well as institutional documents and handbooks, are acceptable texts for the course, but non-fiction and fiction writing falls outside the scope of the course goals. 

For more information about submissions, please contact Pope at arpope@uark.edu for more information. Only three to six submissions will be able to be worked on during the spring semester, but Pope hopes to make this call for clients a regular part of the course going forward when it is taught during the spring. Students who finish the course are then available as editors for hire via the Editing and Consulting Service that Pope coordinates.