My degree is a B.S. in journalism/mass communication (and sociology, though the relevance of that varies). My editing is copy editing/line editing: grammar, spelling, punctuation, usage, minor continuity fixes, making sense. I can work in AP or Chicago style.

In general, I'm prescriptive about spelling and descriptive about commas. Given a choice between a sentence that makes readable sense and a sentence that's technically perfect, I'd rather it be readable, though I'll still point it out in the margins.

Most of my manuscript experience is with speculative fiction. I'm willing to work outside that after discussion of my strengths and weaknesses. For example, Lily Crown (fourth slide) is historical fiction, and Sara A. Mueller asked me to do it because she’d liked my work on The Bone Orchard. I used to have a sample of Bone Orchard as my first slide, but once it was picked up for traditional publishing I replaced it with a screenshot of Sara telling me how clean the copy was. :)

Manuscript samples are from 2009 to present. All are used with permission. [[Double-bracketed]] comments were originally made with the note function, not inserted into the text.  

Below are two pieces from my time at the Iowa State Daily. The first slide is an opinion column from 2007. It required some sentence repair and usage fixes, along with replacing “export" with “deport" throughout.  The next three slides are a feature article from 2008.  It came in having been badly mangled by a misguided section editor and  required rearranging on a major level. The rainbow coloring of the first slide shows the plan for reordering the text I received. In the next slide, the paragraphs have been moved and are now being more finely edited. The last slide is the final product.  

My physical portfolio has a number of these  across a few different papers. However, getting permission to use them online is unfortunately more complicated than permissions for the manuscript samples.

(“Deporting immigrants will cripple economy" by Chris Branstad, “Kumdo brings Korean martial arts to campus” by Lavanya Singh, both used with permission.)