Shift #50 - AP Style & Editing Workshop
Wednesday, July 17, 2024 | 12-1 pm CST/1-2 pm EST (1 hr)
Details
Michelle Hurt, student/intern
Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor
This is a screenshot of the group participants for the workshop. It's always nice to see everyone come together, even if I haven't worked closely with them!
Before the workshop started, Jennifer went over some "housekeeping" since most all of her interns were in attendance. She let us know that she will reply to our week 8 emails by the end of today and also let us know her schedule for the coming week; she'll be at AALL from Friday this week to Tuesday next week so we might not hear from her. In addition she let us know that she'll be sending links to next week's recorded webinars (with a hidden code word in each video - to make sure we actually watched the webinars and paid attention!). She reminded us that drafts are due by the end of this week but to let her know if there are any delays. I really appreciated Jennifer giving us some flexibility with turning in our draft/s but I like the she emphasizes communication - it's okay to be delayed but we should just let her know. Academia isn't necessarily like this although some professors are gracious enough to work us. Same with the workplace; colleagues are OK with some delays (I've found) but it's all about communicating those delays and giving a head's up.
For the workshop, we had Heather Casey who works in the Editing & Publishing Office. She is also a writer and editor of the Law Library blog, In Custodia Legis. She focused the workshop mainly on going over what AP Style is, a departure from the typical grad school format of APA 7. That being said, I'm so glad we had this workshop because I've never written in AP Style before. Heather talked about how we can access a style guide through the Library of Congress and that style guides are necessary to help with consistency, accuracy, and standardization. With consistency, there are multiple authors from different academic backgrounds who write for the blog so it's important that we are all writing in the same style so that it's not jarring for visitors of the blog to read the posts. The AP Style guide is also helpful for us to know rules about sources to use and how to best portray things in the most accurate manner. Heather spent a lot of time going over details of the AP Style like the use of capitalization (ex. B.A. is capitalized but bachelor's degree is not), em dashes (using a space on either side of it), Oxford commas (the Library of Congress loves them!), and ellipses (there are no spaces in between periods - I don't like this one, I'm so used to putting a space after each period in my use of ellipses). Heather also reminded us to be careful about the tone of our blog posts (to be approachable but still professional, no contractions, to be careful of self-promotion, and to select topics that are relevant). It was such a useful workshop and I think positioned all of us interns on a good foot as we continued our writing.
Comments
Post a Comment