Six Years and Counting…

Publication Production (Eng 5420)

The purpose of this course is to introduce professional/technical writing majors to pre-press and printing processes for large-scale print documents. We cover printing terminology, color types, production management techniques, image manipulation for print documents, and pre-press guidelines. Editing and working with clients as well as establishing baseline differences between print and web publications is also part of the course goals.

Spring 2005 semester summary
The majority of this class was spent designing the campus literary magazine, Scribendi, a project that provided many collaborative opportunities for students, which I describe in detail below.

• sections taught in department this term: 1
• number of students enrolled: 19
• numeric evaluations

teaching innovations
This class was a new prep for me at Utah State. I implemented an idea I used for a similar class at previous schools—having students re/design the campus literary magazine. The purpose of this assignment is to give students a real-world example of preparing a large-scale document for a printing press (including real-world deadlines, budgets, and clients). The past editors of Scribendi, the literary magazine at USU, were thrilled to have students work on updating the design. (Past editors were volunteer English department staff and faculty members assigned to oversee the creative writing contest, winners of which were published in the magazine.)

In class, the students worked in small groups to complete the redesign:

• four groups worked on the main content and design (after a collaborative effort on making a template). Each group consisted of a book designer, a graphic designer, and an editor, and the three members worked collectively on one signature (16-page spread) of the magazine;
• a fifth group was responsible for the design template that every group used, the cover, table of contents, and other front- and backmatter;
• a sixth group was the marketing and budget team. They were responsible for raising money (which they elected to do rather than stick with the current budget, even though I informed them that it was not a part of the class) and for writing promotional materials.

The students worked with several clients including the new creative writing contest director, Anne Shifrer, to collect the winning entries; choose how many would fit in the pages we had the budget for; edit the entries and insert them into the template in an appropriate sequence based on thematic issues; collected graphics from artists on campus and matched the graphics to specific texts; and prepared the entire publication for printing. In addition, they raised a significant amount of money (nearly $1,500 in a month) so that they could publish 1,000 copies on a professional press instead of photocopying 100 for departmental use, as had been done in past years.

Because students had a limited budget for printing, which meant a limited number of pages they could print, they decided (with my guidance) to excerpt several large stories and place all winners in their entirety on an accompanying website. Thus, students also had the chance to design the publication for a second medium. The website is linked at the bottom of this post.

Finally, students presented fresh-off-the-press copies of Scribendi to the campus at the annual Student Showcase for undergraduate research. They created a poster to outline their hands-on research activities and distributed nearly 700 copies that week to stakeholders and students around the campus and the community. (The rest of the copies were kept to include in the students’ portfolios and for departmental recruiting efforts.)

narrative evaluations

• “Cheryl has an incredible knack for helping students take charge of their learning. She has such a personable nature that students feel elevated to her level. Cheryl is a great professor, and a mentor that keeps me striving to impress! 10 out of 10.”
• “I thought that the objectives were very clear and we always knew what was expected of us. I also thought the expectations of us were high, which helped us to learn more. I am glad that I had the opportunity to take this class from Cheryl Ball. I thought she was a very good teacher.”
• “Cheryl Rocks! She really pushes for quality and her attitude is positive. She doesn’t take b.s. from anyone and she’s extremely knowledgable about technology that we’re suposed to learn. I appreciate that…. She goes the extra mile.”
• “I felt that the literary magazine redesign was a very good teaching process for publication production. I enjoyed learning the process of publishing an actual magazine. Cheryl, I appreciate the knowledge that you shared with us. I am glad to have a professor that has such a great knowledge of what we are doing, particularly about making a publication as a student [refering to my experiences making litmags when I was a student]. Thank you, Cheryl. You rock! And we learned a lot about responsibility.”
• “I never knew publication production could be so exciting.”

accompanying materials

• Spring 2005 syllabus [PDF]
• PDF copy of Spring 2005 syllabus
• Scribendi website

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