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General Information | Grading | Class blog | Week-by-week | Useful links | Viking Code | Berry COM Job Bank | AP Style tip of the day schedule

The design of this course reflects my experience in newspaper work. I have been a writer, reporter, photographer and editor. Before earning a doctorate and getting into full-time teaching, I was an editor and reporter covering Internet-related businesses and technologies. Why bring that up? Because my goal is to make this course as real-world as possible. We'll be looking at real issues, real problems and real solutions. This class isn't about reading Plato in the ivory towers.

During our time together, I plan to treat you as fellow professional journalists acquiring new skills. I expect you to respond in kind by the quality of your assignments, your ability to meet deadlines, and with active participation, impeccable class attendance and perfect punctuality. Since you already have acquired news writing skills as prerequisites for this course, our relationship is roughly analogous to orienting and training a reporter for the copy desk.

Journalism and the roles of journalists continue to evolve. particularly with the continuting evolution online, the advent if iPads, and the ubiquity of mobile phones and smart phones. This course will introduce you to what is changing in copy editing -- and what is not. We will be discussing the fundamentals of editing that have been vital to newswork for generations. We also will be looking at how new technologies and new challenges are affecting journalism.

Several themes will guide our explorations, including:

· Precision. If the information is not truthful, i.e., accurate, it's not journalism. Our job as editors is to ensure the accuracy of everything we handle.

· Basics. No matter how high-tech things get, good copy editing requires the consistent, skilled application of fundamentals.

· Imagination. Great editing requires creativity and flexible thinking.

· Convergence. The walls have come down within and between media. We need to be able to operate in multiple domains, and to think mobile, geomapped and hypelrocal. We need to think of our stories across several media, and to take advantage of each of those media.

· Critical thinking. In journalism as in life, you will find that not every question has a clear, unambiguous answer -- or even only one answer. You can expect to be challenged to think on your feet, to analyze ambiguous information, to find answers on your own, and to evaluate the credibility and utility of various sources of information.

In this course, it is critical that we communicate well. If there is anything you do not understand, please ask about it immediately. Do not be shy; do not wait, hoping it will all become clear; do not assume that you are the only one who does not get the material. The rule still holds: There are no dumb questions.

I love journalism, and I want to help make it better by training a top-flight group of new journalists to enter the field. My goal for you is to learn about editing, learn to edit and, I hope, for you to gain some of my enthusiasm for news and news editing. If you don't come to share my passion, that's OK. Even if this is not your cup of tea, you will gain skills and perspectives that will make you more effective in any communicating you do, in whatever job or career you choose.

“Editor: A person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.”
--Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915

"Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it."
--Blaise Pascal, 1657

Catalog description: Selection and preparation of written and pictorial materials for newspapers, magazines and related media. Laboratory included. Prereq: COM 301.

Course Purpose & Objectives: Wherever people use language, they need editors. Students will learn to edit and write accurate, relevant and timely news articles, press releases, magazine articles and other communications. There will be an emphasis on grammar, spelling, syntax, style, electronic editing and other elements of complete, concise and accurate publishing. Current events, online news environments, and editing in and for digital media also will be emphasized.

By the end of this course, my goal is for students to:

Reading assignments are identified in the week-by-week schedule.

What you will need (required)

What you may want (not required, but recommended)

Class format

This course is hands-on and active. The classroom is our newsroom. Students will edit copy, check facts, write headlines, make news judgments and design pages. On any given day:

Policies

Assignment rules

While working in class, these parameters apply:

Deadlines

How your grade will be computed:

your final grade, add up your point totals, apply the appropriate percentages, then refer to this +/- grading chart:

Students in COM303 must adhere to the Berry Viking code (downloadable .pdf), particularly the sections on attendance and academic integrity.

If you have special needs of any kind, including learning disabilities, please let me know. Come discuss it with me. I want to make sure on the front end that we prevent any problems associated with the course. From Martha Van Cise, director of the Academic Support Center: “Students with disabilities who believe that they may need accommodation in this course are encouraged to contact the library as soon as possible to ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion.”

• There aren't many publications devoted to copy editing but Copy Editor from McMurry Publishing is a good one. Most of the services here require subscription, but there is a sample issue available free.
• The home page of the American Copy Editors Society is an important, engaging, ever-expanding source of information about, by and for copy editors (and all other journalists, too). The discussion lists put you in touch with a wide range of copy editors and an infinite number of topics. There also are resources, tips and quizzes.
• The Slot: Washington Post copy editor Bill Walsh's wide-ranging site should be in everybody's list of bookmarks. Humorous at times, the site has tips, essays and general information.
• The Poynter Institute is a fount of material for journalists.
• Paul Martin, a copyeditor at the Wall Street Journal for more than 20 years, publishes Style & Substance, a blog for WSJ writers, but of use to us all. He identifies problems in language and defends the paper's austere style.

• The American Society of Newspaper Editors' Careers in Journalism site has some good information, including an up-to-date internship guide and information targeted to that first job at a small newspaper.
• Some good information is to be had at the National Diversity Newspaper Jobs Bank, including listings of minority job fairs.
• Sources of minority internships and fellowships are also available at the National Association of Black Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and Native American Journalists Association sites. Likewise, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association has a jobs board at its site.
• For internships, start by looking at the opportunities in the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund program.
• The Cincinnati SPJ chapter has an interesting report on trends in journalism pay at the "Show Us the Money" site.

• The Exhibits Collection of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Annenberg Foundation is a growing file of interesting material that includes Math in Everyday Life and a separate exhibit on Statistics, which you can find via the site's pull-down search menu. Topics in the stats exhibit include polls and polling, and the use of statistics in an election campaign, random sampling, margin of error, confidence in polling, effect of polls on elections.
• Some other sites, compiled by Deborah Potter and forwarded by Phil Meyer, are the free tools at Newsengin, which include a cost-of-living calculator and percent-change calculator; Statistics Every Writer Should Know, explaining percentages, per capita, margin of error, etc.; and a related page, Finding Data on the Internet -- A Journalist's Guide.
• The jumping-off site for a wide range of calculation engines is the Calculators On-Line Center.
• Speaking of calculators, here's one that converts pounds to grams, decimals to fractions, acres to square miles and other common journalism math conversion issues.Math.com has basic arithmetic to advanced calculus covered in this education site, along with some online calculators and a useful glossary.
• The Numeracy Resources page of this journalism training site gives help with common math, polling and statistics problems.

Strunk and White without E.B. White. This site offers Will Strunk's The Elements of Style in the original.

Jack Lynch's Grammar and Style Notes page.

An excellent tutorial on search engine strategy is available at Bill Dedman's Power Reporting site.

Internet Sources for Copy Editors offers a glimpse at how to use the Internet to get to some useful data bases.

>questions or comments? bc at berry.edu
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