During Fall of 2020, I was the designated copyeditor for several finalists from the 7th Annual South Carolina High School Writing Contest.
The opportunity came about with enrollment in SCHC 384: Writing and Editing For Life, a course taught by Associate Professor, Journalist, and Editor Aïda Rogers. I built a writer-editor professional relationship with finalists of the competition over the course of several months.
After my writers submitted their final drafts to be published in a collection among the other finalists, the course objective shifted to score and select the winners for the 8th annual contest to be published in 2021.
Taught as a seminar-style course, our small group of students gathered twice each week to create, share, and edit a variety of personal stories, creative research assignments, and prompt-led pieces.
Through the development of these projects, I found the importance of the relationship between a writer and their editor, the necessity of organization in both tasks, the importance of accompanying copy such as titles and headlines, as well as the weight that voice carries in writing.
