COMM 337: A shameless sales pitch for COMM 353 and an old editor's note from The Sleepy Weasel

Spring semester I'll be offering another 300-level course at Benedictine. It's an advanced seminar, and it'll focus on magazine editing. Details are not yet final, but it's shaping up to be an another opportunity for you to learn some more about how to get your stuff in print. (Have you read Chapter 10 yet in the "Writer's Digest Guide for Free-Lance Writers?" It's about working with editors.) COMM 353 can also give you a portfolio piece, either for your senior portfolio or for the professional portfolios you'll be schlepping around as you look for communications work. Here's the catalog description:

COMM-353 (3). Advanced Seminar in Writing, Editing and Page Design for Publications. In this seminar, students work on a major publications project, engage in critical reading of media content, discuss writing, editing and page design strategies, have drafts of their work critiqued in class, and develop a professional portfolio of the work. Prerequisite: COMM-150, COMM-207, COMM-208 and COMM-209.

Here's my description, from an editor's note in an old copy of The Sleepy Weasel, a campus magazine I used to coordinate as faculty adviser and de facto production manager. Editing, I said, is "the art of making others look good [in print] without leaving any tracks of your own." Making yourself look good in print, too. (The picture above of a clip art ferret on a stack of books is from an old Sleepy Weasel home page. No animals were harmed in the production of the webpage.) In COMM 353, we'll edit each other's work and we'll get out a demonstration magazine. We'll design it, copyfit it and get the words on paper - or in PDF files - so they can go in your portfolios.

Oh, I almost forgot the reading.

We'll read two little paperback books, the kind that don't go away. One is Carol Fisher Saller, "The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago" (Chicago, 2009). When she says "Chicago," she means the University of Chicago Press. Its stylebook is the editorial standard for magazine and book publishing. The other is James Thurber, "The Years with Ross" (ed. Adam Gopnik, HarperCollins Perennial Classics edition, 2001). It's about Harold Ross, a legendary editor of The New Yorker in the 1930s and 1940s. Long time ago, but it was sort of a Golden Age in American culture - and The New Yorker was arguably the best of the best. We can learn a lot about craftsmanship, and art and other things that matter from reading it.

We'll also keep up with The New Yorker online. It's still around, and it's still good. Check it out at http://www.newyorker.com/.

I'm still working on the syllabus, but here are some draft goals and objectives:

A. Goals.
• Students will learn basic editorial principles, attitudes and practices in academic and quality magazine settings
• Students will gain practical editing experience on a demonstration literary magazine.
• Students will gain metacognitive knowledge of their experience and its relation to the practices and principles detailed in their readings

B. Student Learning Objectives. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to demonstrate mastery of specific editing skills required in the preparation of articles and art for publication and in the production of a "little" magazine of literature, the arts and public affairs.

And here's an editor's column I wrote for The Weasel a couple of years ago, lightly edited. The link was dead when I checked this morning, so I copied it from an old flash drive. In spite of my shameless punning, it's a pretty good statement of what I hope my students learn from working on a magazine.

Weasel words: Hickory dickory … mission in action

By Pete Ellertsen

While we were crashing this year’s edition of The Sleepy Weasel the other day, editorial assistant Claire Keldermans asked me what I was going to say in the editor’s column. I told her I’m an old newspaper guy so I'd run out the clock, I probably wouldn’t decide till the very last minute.

“Hickory dickory dock,” she said.

Run that by me again, I asked. Real slow.

“Hickory dickory, Doc,” she replied.

My students call me “Doc,” and Claire said she thought the pun was cute.

Oh, I said.

That’s my usual response to puns. Oh. Anything more would be too effusive, would run the risk of encouraging still more puns. But a good pun, especially on deadline during final edit when we’re all a little giddy anyway, ought not to go unacknowledged.

Hence the headline.

That wasn’t the only pun. This year’s Weasel is Volume 13 of a magazine that grew out of a small group project in a freshman English composition class I taught in 1995. For their project, they put on a “Beat generation” style coffeehouse complete with red-checkered tablecloth, candle stub jammed into an empty chianti bottle and, of course, poetry. The project morphed into a poetry club, and the club quickly reinvented itself as a student publication. Over time it developed into a campus magazine showcasing the creative work of students, faculty, staff and friends of Springfield College in Illinois and now Benedictine University at Springfield.

This year has been one of transition on campus, and we’ve given some thought to what we’ve been doing with the Weasel and what we hope to do in future. Out of this process, we crafted a mission statement:

The Sleepy Weasel is a campus magazine of the arts and public affairs published by students and faculty of Springfield College and Benedictine University, on the World Wide Web at and in hard-copy format at the College's campus in Springfield. The Weasel seeks to highlight written and artistic work by our students, both in and out of class, and to help promote a sense of community on campus by providing a voice for the creative work of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others in the Springfield-Benedictine community.

So I decided if we’re putting our mission into action, we can call it mission in action.

Oh.

I could almost read Claire’s mind.

Oh. Let’s not encourage him.

OK, OK, it wasn’t that funny. Like I said, life gets a little giddy during final edit. But the Sleepy Weasel’s mission is real, and we take it seriously.

An important part of our mission is involving students in the editing, design and production of the magazine. This year’s cover is Claire’s. A senior in mass communications, she shot the photo, worked her magic on it in a photo-editing program and designed the cover. And she caught right on to copyfitting, which I’ve heard aptly compared to cramming three pounds of text into a two-pound bag (except “text” wasn’t the word that was actually used). I especially wanted to involve her in editing creative writing for style. Judi Anderson, my colleague in the Arts and Letters Division and co-adviser to The Sleepy Weasel, is a gifted editor in the tradition of the 20th-century book doctors who brought out the best in authors as different as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway and Ring Lardner. So I started Claire out by studying Judi’s edited manuscripts, then turned her loose on some raw copy of her own.

You won’t notice the editors’ handiwork. By definition, good editing is invisible. It’s nothing more – or less – than the art of making others look good without leaving any tracks of your own. By semester’s end, Claire said she was mentally adding or deleting commas, correcting grammatical errors, playing with word order, tightening up copy and generally tinkering with the written word every time she saw a written word.

“I’m beginning to see edits everywhere,” she said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

[… and so on. She even saw edits when she drove past billboards on the way to campus. I’m omitting the description of stories that were in that year’s issue. - pe]

Sleepy Weasel, Vol. 13 (Spring 2009).