Writing [Editing] is Rewriting - Nolan Varee Blog Post 1

It never occurred to me that I enjoyed writing. Writing was something that I did the night before a paper was due, not a skill to practice and improve. It wasn’t until my second semester of graduate studies at UMBC, after making revisions to numerous drafts of various papers, that I finally came to understand that - as Dr. Chapin loves to say - writing is rewriting. It became a game to me, a challenge to improve my work every time I came back to it. Instead of throwing words on the paper and hitting print I began pushing myself to make every sentence clear and concise. 

My new interest in writing and editing pushed me to think about how I could include these skills in my future career. After discussing the possibilities with a number of professors in the history department, I was introduced to Dr. Kathryn Cramer Brownell, a Professor of history at Purdue University, and Co-Editor of the Made By History section of the Washington Post. 

Made By History serves as a venue for historians and other scholars to comment on current events while placing them in historical context. Each week, the team at MBH recruits, edits, and publishes eleven pieces online. I began my internship with MBH in order to gain an understanding of the work of an editor for a publication. I would shadow Dr. Brownell in her editing process in order to see if this was a career I would like to pursue. 

However, before I could jump into editing, I was given a project that would allow me to continue to improve my research and writing skills. Using typical periods studied in a survey US history course (American Revolution, Civil War, WWI, etc.) I was tasked with organizing existing MBH pieces into these various categories in order to promote the use of these pieces in secondary and undergraduate classes. Unfortunately, MBH did not have a searchable database of their published pieces, forcing me to first create a rough database in order to begin searching for keywords in the titles of the over 2,000 existing pieces. When this process was all said and done, I would then bring the pieces together into one finished product and write descriptions of the pieces and how they fit into the larger theme. 

I knew that this was going to be a big project that would take most of the summer. But I also knew that completing this project successfully would allow me to understand how MBH pieces are written, which would be useful when it came time to make edits of my own. So I set out to find the representative pieces, reading numerous pieces per day, tagging and annotating as I went. 

In my next post I will describe some of the issues that came up in my search, as well as the problems we had in trying to figure out how this project would be promoted. I’ll also describe my experience working with Dr. Brownell and the MBH editing process.