The Penn Stater Magazine

Watch for Typos—Our Copy Editor is Leaving

July 30, 2009 at 11:55 am Tina Hay 1 comment

Chas Brua, our copy editor for the past 12 years. Photo by Bill Cardoni.

If you notice more typos than usual in our September-October issue—which of course I’m hoping you don’t—it’s all Chas’ fault.

Chas Brua ’86, ’02g, ’09g, our ace copy editor and fact checker for more than 12 years, is leaving us. Today is his last day. And, while he has already edited about a third of the Sept-Oct issue, we still have a lot of pages left to finish, and we’re on our own for those.

If you’re wondering what a copy editor does, basically, well, he proofs every freaking word that appears in the magazine.

—For every single class note and every single obituary, for example, he verifies every single detail: year of graduation, student activities, address, etc.

—He reads every piece of editorial copy, from the 30-word captions to the 3,000-word features, and he usually reads them a half-dozen times at least: when they first come in from the writer, when they’ve been laid out by the art director, when the pages come back from the prepress vendor, and so on. In the early stages he gives us his take on whether the story “works” or not, where it gets bogged down or confusing, why the ending doesn’t feel right. In later stages he’s looking more carefully at the minutiae: what should get italicized, which spelling of “theatre” we should use, whether the phrase “abusive marriage” might constitute libel.

—He proofs the ads—both the paid ads and the house ads.

I can’t tell you how many times he’s caught misspellings, typos, sentences that made no sense, and other errors that could have gotten us in trouble.

Chas (his first name rhymes with “jazz”) came to us in December 1996, not long after I started as editor. He had been working at the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat when we hired him as our copy editor. (I remember that when he told us in the job interview that he found himself wanting to copy-edit restaurant menus and road signs, we knew he was the guy for us.)

For a while he continued to work at the Tribune-Democrat, so he’d commute back and forth from State College to Johnstown daily and still put in hours at the magazine.

Later, when we had an opening for a full-time associate editor, we hired Chas for that position. He was in charge of a couple of sections of the magazine, wrote several features, and continued to be our fact checker and copy editor. Later still, he decided to go to grad school at Penn State, so he went back to part-time status at the magazine. He got his master’s in teaching English as a second language in 2002 and successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in applied linguistics in May of this year.

He is known on staff by many nicknames: Dr. Chas, Chasworth, and Copywallah, among others.

Starting Monday, he’ll be doing a postdoctoral gig over in the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, basically doing stuff to help Penn State faculty and grad students be better instructors. We’re all excited for him to pursue his new career, but we do not look forward to replacing him.

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: Alumni Association, The Penn Stater magazine, Undergraduate education. Tags: Bill Cardoni, Charles Brua, Chas Brua, copy editing, fact checking, Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence.