Ladies and gentlemen, this is a blog post about blog posts—more specifically about how we at Ooligan edit blog posts before they appear on this very blog. Ooligan blog posts are written by graduate students in the book publishing program at Portland State; some of them have written dozens of posts, for others their first Ooligan post may be their first blog post ever. With so many different authors, the editing process is crucial for providing a consistent voice for the blog. This is how the process works:

1. The editor first reads through the blog post at least once to get a basic understanding of what it is about, and make sure the post conforms to the topic assigned.
2. They then go through the post and fix any grammatical errors they find. They make changes as needed, but don’t rewrite content unless absolutely necessary.
3. Next comes the style check. The editor makes sure the post follows our house style falling back on the Chicago Manual of Style as needed. If they need a reference sheet it can be found on the Trello board for Social Media. For those of you who don’t know what Trello is, it is a collaboration site that allows Ooligan to put all the info of our various projects online for Ooligan members to see and work on. It’s like a big white board with sticky notes attached for each particular assignment, but much more elaborate. If the author has a question how to HTML code for instance, they could look on the Trello board for Social Media and find the document on blogging and coding.
4. Speaking of HTML coding, that is next on the list for the editor. They go through the document looking specifically at the HTML code. He or she will make changes if necessary. It is not the editorial team’s responsibility to code, but rather the author’s. We are just checking that the code validates and that there are no misplaced brackets or curly quotes.
5. The editor needs to make sure they are aware of the date that a post is due, and have it done by that date. Or even before. The editor will mark off a checklist on Trello as they complete tasks, so the social media department head knows that it is ready to be posted. Once everything is checked off, they are done, and can move on to their next blog post.