This course at Illinois State University enrolled primarily publishing majors and some graduate students in professional writing (300-level classes are cross listed). It focused on different “levels of edit”—from offering developmental feedback on in-progress work to finding that unintentionally italicized comma and correcting it. In studying these issues, the course asked students to answer a big-picture question: What does it mean to be an editor? Examples and assignments that placed student-editors into real rhetorical situations where the answers aren’t always clear-cut were used throughout the course. The main project, for instance, was to provide developmental editing and copy editing to our university writing program’s new, experimental scholarly journal, Grassroots, which serves as the textbook to all first-year writing classes.

Syllabus: 353s12.ceball.com