Editing a school magazine article for consistency
You are editing a Sinhala school magazine. A student's article about a sports day mixes past and present tense within paragraphs, alternates between two spellings of the same place name, and uses a casual spoken form in the middle of otherwise formal narration. The article is otherwise lively and well organised. The student is proud of the piece and has said the 'chatty bits' are what make it fun. The magazine has a faculty adviser who wants a consistent house style but does not want to flatten students' voices. You must decide what to change, what to leave, and how to explain it to the student.
1. Distinguish between errors that must be fixed and features that should be preserved.
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Must fix (consistency and correctness):
- Tense slips within a paragraph where the time frame has not changed; these confuse the reader about sequence.
- The two spellings of the place name; pick one and apply it throughout, since a magazine should be internally consistent.
- Unintentional register breaks where the spoken form appears without framing.
Preserve (voice):
- Direct quotation of what people said, which can legitimately be colloquial if marked as quotation.
- Deliberate stylistic shifts that are signalled, e.g. a short chatty sentence used as a paragraph opener and then returned from.
The test is whether the shift is controlled and meaningful or accidental. Accidental shifts read as carelessness; controlled ones read as style.
2. Draft the explanation you would give the student, in principle, about why the changes do not destroy their voice.
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Explain that editing is not erasure. The student's lively content and humour stay; what changes is consistency.
Points to make:
- Readers notice inconsistency before they notice style; a shifting tense or spelling distracts from the story.
- A spoken phrase lands harder when it stands out against formal narration. If the whole piece drifts in and out, the chatty bits stop being special.
- Offer a compromise: keep one or two deliberate colloquial moments, clearly framed (for example as a quoted remark), and make the rest consistent.
This respects the student's ownership, meets the adviser's house-style requirement, and teaches the difference between voice and error.