An intern's day...as an editor

As many of you already know, I intern at a national consumer women’s magazine. And being an intern at a large glossy in NYC is incredibly fun and rewarding but, as you may know from my blog or your own personal experience, not always so glamorous. In my 6+ weeks here, I’ve done filing and photocopying, fact-checking and researching, and plenty of closet organization and phone calling. But today, ladies and gents, I didn’t do any of that menial administrative stuff. I actually felt like…an editor.

Since the features editor whom I work for was out of the office for the day, she called me up in a frantic mess to take care of some things while she was gone. The problem; the text for one of the stories she had written didn’t fit on the page layout. The solution: Intern to the rescue! She wanted me to edit it down to size.

Let’s rewind a bit. I was terrified when I received this assignment. I had barely done any sort of editing before (unless you count copy-editing my friends’ poorly written college essays for content, grammar and spelling), much less for an actual magazine. So while this assignment was exciting and finally something that’d stimulate my itching desire to work on the magazine’s feature stories, I was terrified. What exactly did she want me to edit out? Unnecessary adjectives? Entire sentences? Little words here and there?

And to top it all off, in order to make the edits I had to use a publishing program that I wasn’t even remotely familiar with. This had to be done on my boss’ computer since mine wasn’t set up with the program. In my mind, this was a disaster waiting to happen.

But, as per usual, being the worry wart that I am, I got nervous over nothing. While it took over an hour to finally get the 500 word blurbs down to size, the assignment was actually kind of...fun. I still wasn't positive that my edits were good enough, but I sent on the new and improved version to my editor for review.

And, to my luck,my editor raved about how good of a job I did. My version is now off to the executive editor and the editor-in-chief, who will then determine if the text is ok. I’m terrified to hear their thoughts on the piece after I got my grimy intern hands on it, but regardless, I’m flattered that my editor trusted me enough with such a big responsibility. And now, I can finally say that I've got some real-world editing experience under my belt.

--Ed's Intern #1