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Editor In Progress



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Sat Feb 28, 2015 10:48 am
Rydia says...



An article from a couple of years ago which I thought may be of interest to some of you :)

Editor In Progress

Many of us want to be editors. Some have taken a few small steps toward that goal and others are still hanging on to the bottom rung of the ladder and staring with a mixture of steely determination and avalanching fear up at the top. Great climbers will tell you 'don't look down' but that's exactly what I'm telling you to do.

Look down. Take your eyes off that big, shiny goal and aim for the next rung on the ladder. Think small. Don't pass up an opportunity because it doesn't look like it will take you far enough.

Because really, how far does a sail boat go; how long is a piece of string? (Though of course we know it's twice as long as half its length).

Half a year ago I started working for an obscure I.T. Company and I was thinking of it as a stepping stone. A place where my foot would land for a moment and then I'd be off again. We have to keep ourselves away from that kind of thinking. That kind of thinking keeps us from putting our full effort into a task and I realised this a few weeks in and turned my attitude around.

It wasn't a role that used my writing abilities to their full potential and often it was even tedious or frustrating. But two weeks ago this obscure I.T. Company started training me on their gazette and now I'm almost an editor. The gazette is our daily online newsletter distributed to three of the UK's top ten banks with a readership of around five thousand bankers. I edit it.

In a larger company I could work for years without being presented with the same opportunities but in the world of small business, where you're under-staffed and under budget, there's a lot of room for expanding your responsibilities. It might not look like much at first but stay alert and put both feet on the stepping stone. You never know where it's going to take you.

I start work at 7:30am sharp and right up until that 9:00am deadline, I feel like I'm an editor. I am selecting articles, cutting up descriptions and correcting headlines while re-ordering them around a strict template. When work resumes and I remember it's only an hour and a half of my day, I also remember: that's more than most recent graduates can expect.
Writing Gooder

~Previously KittyKatSparklesExplosion15~

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