Today was a very practical lesson with Jess: we began with a requested grammar refresher as we weren’t confident with our grammar skills last week. The grammar refresher was brief but covered the essential parts. Almost everything was already common knowledge to me from my English Language undergraduate, but it was very useful to have a memory boost, especially when it came to colons, semicolons and the oxford comma.

I enjoyed the examples that Jess gave and how grammar errors can cause ambiguity and seem funny: “Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.” Commas are very important! We also saw the example of how an apostrophe error caused issues for Marks and Spencer – it caused the item to not sell because of this grammatical error. It was interesting to see that the work of a copyeditor is extremely important for a business.

The rest of the lesson was very practical and discussion based. We were given two texts to edit in our own time and we discussed it after as a whole group. I found the discussion the part when I learned most and I enjoyed contributing the errors that I found – some of them worked and some didn’t. One issue that I asked Jess about whilst completing the task independently was the use of names in the text. There were inconsistencies so instead of changing it, Jess suggested to query the issue to the author. This would be something that is down to judgement when working on a job.

We also learned how to follow a style guide, specifically the Bloomsbury style guide. A great tip that I took away from the lesson was to write a cheat sheet when first running through a style guide. On this you can write down the parts that are likely to arise during the text to then make it easier when editing. I found it much easier having a style guide to follow, whenever I was unsure, the style guide answered the questions.

Jess recommended the English with Lucy Youtube channel for further grammar help.