I’m Christina, and I’ve been obsessed with (and sometimes frustrated by!) words my entire life. I started to edit professionally in 2010, but my love of, and interest in, language sprouted very early in my life.

Put it this way: did you ever do Scholastic book orders when you were in school? If so, did you ever hear about an 11-year-old kid ordering a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a grammar guide from one of those things? Well, I was that kid. Of course, we could go back even further and talk about the first poem I ever wrote.

But instead, let’s fast-forward to 2008 – that was the year I joined Ryerson’s publishing program.

When I started the program, I didn’t know if it would be right for me, but I did have a sense (based on the infamous Scholastic book order and other, similar incidents), that editing would be my focus, since even then, typographical errors gave me fits.

As it turns out, the Ryerson program opened up a whole new world, as I learned that there was more to editing than nitpicking over commas – there was also fact-checking, ferreting out gaps in logic, and fixing “infelicities in communication” (how I love that phrase!) to boot.

In short: editing allowed me to give labels to problems in text that I recognized, but couldn’t precisely describe. I was hooked.

About halfway through the program in late 2009, I realized that I wanted to freelance, and started to work on this site in earnest. That’s when I learned that in addition to editing, I also enjoyed writing web and SEO copy, and liked figuring out the innards of WordPress.

With this new-found resolve, I joined the Editors’ Association of Canada. A month after that, I joined the Writers’ Community of Durham Region, and a few months after joining, I became a Board Member.

Since then, I’ve done a lot to hone my skills and help out other writers. For example, I now manage the WCDR’s editing directory, and helped write a series of pages on the WCDR’s main site about how editors work with writers. I’ve also acted as a first-tier judge for the WCDR’s annual short story contest and provided feedback on contest entries.

Courses completed at Ryerson

In case you’re wondering, these were the courses I took at Ryerson. Now that I’m a graduate of the program, a fuller discussion of each is available on my blog.

• Overview: Education
• Overview: Trade
• Copy Editing for Books, Journals, and Reports
• Production for Books, Journals, and Reports
• Substantive Editing
• Fiction Editing
• Electronic Publishing
• Proofreading
• Introduction to Book Design