Stressing the Importance of Copy Editing

By: James C. Oakley

Ana Cantu has done many things in her life.  For starters, Cantu graduated from The University of Texas in Austin. After graduation, she worked a serious of notable journalism jobs including working at the Austin American-Statesman, performing the duties of Staff Writer and Editor at Newsday, and working as part of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning team at the LA Times. She then began working in the tech world, working at Ebay and Dell, and is currently the Social Media Campaign Manager at Google.  This list of achievements can leave many wondering what her secret is.

“I really love editing,” said Cantu at this Wednesday night’s presentation as part of Texas State’s Mass Comm Week.

“I’m a much better editor than I am a writer,” said Cantu. “Being an editor helps you be a better writer or storyteller in any kind of content field that you want to go into, whether in P.R., advertising, marketing or journalism, because it forces you to get to the core of the story and cut what you don’t need and expand what you don’t have.”

Cantu’s message encouraged young writers to hone their skills both in editing and working cooperatively with their team.

“If you don’t work collaboratively well, your reputation will suffer,” said Cantu, “and it will affect the kind of assignments and work that you get.”

Francisco Cruz is studying international relations at Texas State and found Cantu’s success story very inspiring. “I liked hearing how she got where she is. I don’t know how to start out, if I should just jump into big companies or take it slow,” said Cruz. “I’m very interested in working at an international company like Google or Dell.”

Texas State senior Daniel Domenech concurred with Cantu’s opinion on copy editing.

“It was reassuring that the copy editing field is doing well. It’s something I’m very interested in,” said Domenech. “I was glad to know there’s a lot of opportunity for it and that someone could be super successful and branch out a little bit.”