… or else it gets the hose again.
Ah, yes, I’ve been editing articles for the English Magazine, which is now a course. Actually, a lot of them are pretty good. But I just wish we’d had more time for proofreading, editing, and so on.
However, I have stumbled on a near trick I’m going to get students to try. That is, I’m going to have them take the edited files and do “compare files” using MS Word or whatever word processor they use. Then they have to pick out all the edits and formulate a checklist that can double as a set of guidelines.
There are some interesting developments I hope are afoot for the magazine, though. We’re working on getting this magazine turned into a webzine, in the hope that the print edition can, well, go out of print. One thing that may help this happen is the fact that a professor from the US who is visiting has been talking with me about joint projects that could be run between several schools internationally. It seems his uni and mine, and another one in England, are all mutually sister-universities. If we could find one or two more universities that are interested in doing an English-language student publication online, we could get a really neat site going, where student-written work from all around the world gets pooled and shared.
Given the current focus in Korea–and especially at my school these days–on the buzz of internationalization and globalization, I think this project would be really cool. Not just that, but it would also give students connections to other students at sister universities.
Optimally, though, the course would lead to a couple of part-time reporter/editing assistant positions at the university, for students who did well in the course and would like to keep writing articles. This would be a huge help to me, since this is the kind of class that ought to be team-taught, but getting the green-light for classes to be team-taught is quite difficult, and because of the course/program structure essentially none of the students are experienced at article-writing when they start out in the course, and because it’s hard to get out decent feature articles in time.
Also, if the print magazine is made obsolete, there would be some funding available. Maybe we could make it a job-for-scholarship kind of thing, and even have students from across the campus submit their work (and interview) for the opportunity. This would be a massive improvement over the old model, in which students ended up being members for reasons apparently other than writing ability or interest in writing. The dual effect was that the best writers — including some star students I know personally — quit almost immediately after joining the club, and that the students who remained got big writing gigs they couldn’t, in my opinion, handle… and the scholarship funding.
This is all stuff I’ll need to talk with my department fellows about, but I am hoping one or two interviewed, writing-submission vetted reporter-editor positions could be set up with some of the scholarship funding. (Reserving, of course, a little money — or server space and cash for a domain name — for the international version of the magazine, should it become a reality.)