By Sarah Bills
Maurianne Dunn corrects professors'' errors with red ink on a regular basis - something most students won''t get the chance to do in a lifetime.
The responsibility for proofreading articles and books written by BYU professors and other professional religious scholars from around the country falls on interns like Dunn, 22, from Bluffdale, Salt Lake County, who recently graduated from BYU with a bachelor''s degree in English.
'It''s kind of intimidating at first, but you have to think of it as just another article,' Dunn said. 'Sometimes you just have to ignore the author''s name.'
Dunn is one of 18 recent graduates and undergraduates who intern as editors at BYU Studies, a publishing company that puts out a quarterly journal and books that discuss Mormonism in a scholarly way. The articles deal with various issues, including church history, and Latter-day Saints'' views on art, music, science and literature. The quarterly journal has 4,000 subscribers around the world.
The interns'' primary responsibilities are fixing mechanical errors, helping layout the pages and comparing original sources with facts and quotes cited in the article or book they are editing.
'We spend a lot of time in the library and in special collections,' Dunn said. 'It gets kind of tedious sometimes; it''s especially hard if you can''t find the source.'
The job has plenty of challenges that keep interns on their toes, said Anastasia Sutherland, one of three managing editors for BYU Studies. She said one of the biggest challenges is walking the line between making something the best it can be and keeping the author''s style and tone.
'A lot of people have a bad idea about editors, but editors are here to make you look the best you can look,' Sutherland said.
According to Dunn, the interns try to limit the changes they make to blatant errors in order to retain the author''s voice.
Even then, changes made by interns are reviewed and either approved or discarded by managing editors, she said.
'(The interns'') edit isn''t what is necessarily reflected in the final copy,' said Sutherland.
In this way, the managing editors and senior members of the BYU studies staff act as a safety net for the interns, said Aaron Cummings, 23, an intern and a junior majoring in comparative literature from Leesburg, Va.
The system gives interns the opportunity to actively help with most of the jobs in a publications company while still receiving supervision, Cummings said. Interns are given a big responsibility without being thrown into a professional environment right away.
'Editing teaches you not to be afraid of asking questions,' Cummings said. 'If you don''t know the answer to something, and you don''t question it, it could be published incorrectly, and it would be your fault. You are constantly confronted with your limitations and that puts you on a very high learning curve, if you face it with the right attitude.'