When I was teaching through UCSC Extension, one of the students asked if I would meet her outside of class for intensive, one-on-one instruction in editing. I agreed. Turns out, she'd been recently hired as an editor by a major player in the industry, and she now found herself in over her head because, actually, she couldn't edit. Her background? She'd been a massage therapist who'd taken to computers when the desktop models first came out, and so she'd begun a small desktop publishing business. As she worked with the various pieces clients gave her, she began to make little corrections here and there. Soon, she was calling herself an editor. (After all, she was making changes in someone else's text, wasn't she?)
