Workshop
Editing is the art of making every word in a 500,000 word document be spelled the same way. Also, punctuation. Also, headings. The only thing you should see when you are reading a short story or a FDA document is the data or the ideas. You should not be tripped up by misspellings, bad punctuation, bad grammar and inappropriate heading styles.
Style guides are instructions on spelling, punctuation, capitalization, formatting. Every Heading 1 should be indented identically with identical fonts and styles. Sub-Saharan Africa should be always spelled sub-Saharan Africa throughout the document. Notice the only time it is spelled differently is when it is the first word in a sentence. Similarly, a general rule is spell out a number at the beginning of a sentence, but use the numerical value inside. One rule is always to have 1 style. In MJoTA, all numbers are given numerically, and all abbreviations are spelled out, United States is always spelled out.
AMA Style Guide. You need to buy it, keep it on your desk, read through this and absorb it. Many clients expect you to use the AMA Style Guide as a default.
Chicago Manual of Style. This is used by newspapers and is more intuitive than the AMA Style Guide.
MJoTA Style Guide. This was adapted from an in-house style guide, AMA Style Guide and the Chicago Manual of Style. Click to download.
Assignment
Write an article on the relationship between cutting out salt and hypertension for a black newspaper using the New York Times style guide
Edit 2 malaria papers, pick 2 essays written by Dr William Brieger that are on the same topic. Select them from his articles in his blog, http://malariamatters.org/. Edit them according to the AMA Style Guide. Save this as a file with the date, your name, and date of Dr Brieger's column. This article is for publication, and you will be acknowledged as the editor.
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