Have you ever read a Facebook post or a tweet or a blog and noticed errors? You don’t have to be an editor to notice that internet writing isn’t often held up to the same standards as print. Most of the time, it’s up to those who write internet content to also make sure that that content is ready to be seen by the public, and sometimes some glaring errors can get through.
The ever-present alot monster from Hyperbole and a Half.
Maintaining an online presence is becoming increasingly important for any viable business, but dipping one’s hands into different forms of media is even more important for publishers, the people who create media. This is no different for Ooligan Press. Ooligan is a learning platform for publishing students at Portland State. Students make the business decisions, and students build the business’s online presence: we write the blog.
But when a blog becomes a major way to represent the press online, it is equally important to make sure that that blog is clean, professional, and without errors. That begins with editing. Here at Ooligan Press, it is my job as the assistant editorial lead to make sure the blog content gets edited. The students in the program write the posts, and that process is managed by the social media department. Then, once we’ve collected them all into our database, I get to take over for a while.
Every week, the editing department relies on volunteers from the press to help with the daily editorial work. We call them “floaters” because they float from other projects and departments. Each floater takes a specific upcoming blog post and checks it against the Ooligan Press style guide for errors, consistency, and clarity. This includes looking at the blog text, the HTML coding, and any links or references to other sites. Only after the floaters and the assistant editorial lead look over each post do we consider it ready to be uploaded to the blog. Then the social media department takes it over again.
Every single blog post at Ooligan Press goes through this process. Someone has even edited this post. Thanks, Alexis, for volunteering to float for the Ooligan editing department this week. Say hi to our blog readers, Alexis! She can’t; copyeditors try to minimize their presence in a writing piece as much as possible. But we still rely on them a lot to make us look good.
If you have a blog, how do you make sure that the text is clean and free of errors?