Andrew Phelan Internship

I continued my work with the Catholic Textbook Project this week by continuing to become more involved and making a larger impact on the team. The week as a whole was incredibly hectic, but I found the work I did for this internship to be very interesting and great practice for skills that I have been wanting to develop.

                  My task this week was a continuation of the images work I did last week. I was asked to do what is called a ‘cold read’ and report my findings to the team. The cold read was on the 34 chapters of the Middle Ages Reader that I worked on last week, so I was familiar with the structure and content of the book at a surface level. When doing a cold read, the goal is to read through a work and flag any discrepancies or examples of poor grammar, spelling, or flow. For my work specifically, I was given a table to record my findings on as well as a guide to keep my focused on the most important issues. While reading through the entire book seemed tedious at first, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed following along and how much I was able to take away from it.

                  The guide I was given laid out four categories of findings. There are as follows:

• Historical sensitivity — dates that seem inconsistent or implausible, anachronistic language or objects, or anything that reads as historically off — flag for later checking, don’t research it now.
• Consistency — proper nouns, titles, or terminology spelled or styled differently across stories; a figure’s name in a nonstandard spelling or transliteration.
• Copy errors — missing, misspelled, or misused words.
• Clarity & flow — sentence-level awkwardness or confusing phrasing that would trip up a young reader.

Having this list not only gave me the specific verbiage I needed to complete the work, but it helped me stayed focused on the most important tasks. While reading I was noting repeated phrases or pieces of grammar and tracked their consistency. Whenever there was a historical detail, I would take a second to consider its accuracy or cross reference it with another source. This kept me from trying to analyze every small detail from scratch and becoming overwhelmed.

                  A set of skills I have been actively trying to become better at has been grammar and lexicon. It is important as a historian and writer to hold a firm grasp on the rules of our language, which are unfortunately glossed over in my high school English courses. While I felt comfortable with these concepts, doing this assignment gave me hundreds of opportunities to practice punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, and quotation. For example, during one chapter, a figure was named Abbot Benedict and a sentence referred to him as “The Abott.” I looked through following pages and chapters as well as did research online and determined it should refer to him as ‘The abott’ since the title is not before his name or replacing his name. This and the endless other examples gave me a lot of time to familiarize myself with small details like this one which will benefit my reading and editing skills in the future.