Commas, hyphens, parentheses, semicolons, and geologic periods.

Here at school, and even outside of school, everyone always asks me what my major is. This is just a little annoying for me. If I saw say "English Language," people think of English, and I get a few customary questions: "So, do you like to read a lot?" or "What do you want to do with that, teach?" I'm not an English major. I'm an English Language major. If I tell people the abbreviation, "ELang," they often don't understand; once someone thought I said I was a "healing" major. I've considered responding with "English linguistics," but I haven't yet.

But rarely does anyone ask about someone's minor, so I'm going to talk about mine--both of them!

My first minor is Editing. I've wanted to be an editor since high school. (Previous to that, I wanted to be a dentist--a very bad idea indeed.) I hate to be conceited, but I'm pretty good at English-related stuff, and it's fairly intuitive to me. In high school I was always top of my class and got a 36 on the English portion of the ACT.

The Editing minor is very common, especially among ELang and English majors. I can't decide if my past experience with this kind of thing is exceptional or not. Sometimes I think if people have made it to BYU and want to do the Editing minor, they must have been the tops of their classes and also received 36s. But sometimes I think that's not quite the case. Last year I got 100% on all of the tests for my grammar class, but most people didn't. Sometimes people will ask questions, the answers to which seem so obvious to me.

One of my classes this semester is ELang 350, Basic Editing Skills. This is a crucial class. Most postings I see for jobs or internships require 350. Basically, 350 is what will actually make me qualified for certain editing positions. The class is crucial--but annoying.

If it were not for this class, my semester would be pretty easy. So it's better that I have this hard class when the rest are easy, instead of having multiple hard ones. But it's so much work! It's a three-credit class but it's more work than my four-credit geology class! We have a test every couple of weeks. I took one yesterday. There was one question I'm pretty sure we didn't talk about. So I wrote that I've done all the reading and been to all the classes and I'd never heard that term, and then I spent three paragraphs guessing about what it could possibly be. I just hope the grader (either the professor or the TA) has a sense of humor. We have several projects we have to do for the class. AND we have to do tons of reading, most of which seems unnecessary to me. (We have to READ the Chicago Manual of Style? Really?) I've heard that my professor gives more work than other professors teaching this same class. But others have survived, so I guess I will too.

I enrolled in 14 credits for the semester, but this week I added another one. I'm on the staff for a student journal called Schwa, a linguistic journal. You can be on a student journal just for experience, or you can get credit for it. I always hate doing stuff when I know it's not contributing to my study hours, so the remedy was to make my time on the student journal count for credit! I think it makes a little more work for me, because I have to have a total of 45 hours working for the journal by the end of the semester. But all of it's for credit, instead of doing less work for no credit.

One of the papers I edited this week was written by a professor--an ELang professor who, I think, even taught some editing classes. The irony is that his paper was riddled with errors! I can't expect anyone to be perfect; recently I went through my old posts and found a fair amount. But there are lots of times when he's missing a comma that seems so obvious to me, and he's overly colon happy. This makes me think that maybe I am more exceptional, if someone like this can make it all the way to become a professor!

The Editing minor is super common, especially among English and ELang majors, as I mentioned before. It's also decently common among people with other majors. I decided I didn't want to be just like all those other people. I also didn't want to be stuck in a narrow education, since the Editing minor is housed under the ELang department. I decided to do a second minor.

This minor is Geology. In summer of 2010, I took Geology 100, a class called "Dinosaurs!" The exclamation mark is actually part of the course name. I even got to go with my professor on his professional fossil excavation. After this I found my ears perking up whenever I heard geology mentioned. I remember being sad I probably wouldn't take any more geology classes, but one night at dinner, my mom mentioned I could do a double minor. I looked at options for minors that might interest me, and it just so happened that Geology was the shortest one.

Sometimes I have a hard time thinking of myself as a Geology minor, since I don't know much about it yet. But I'm in a geology class this semester, and I'm only taking it because of the minor.

The class is Geology 111, Introduction to Physical Geology. I'm loving it! When I saw topics like "igneous rocks" and "sedimentary rocks" on the syllabus, I thought it would be boring. But it's actually quite interesting! Our most boring subject so far has been minerals, but that wasn't even too bad.

This week I started the chapter about sedimentary rocks. It started off talking about the Grand Canyon. In fall of 2010, I took a trip to southern Utah with my parents. (One of these years I'm going to go to school in the fall...) We took a side trip to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Before I'd been there, I wondered what was so great about it--you just look at a giant hole. But when I saw it myself--well, the adjective "Grand" doesn't do it justice.


The textbook showed a diagram about the different sediments, each dating to a different time period. The bottom layer (of the canyon) dates to the Precambrian Age. That's as old as it gets! Geology is so fascinating to me. Millions and millions of years ago, the giant formations we see were not even there, or else were very different. And the rocks we see come from different places. Some were once in a liquid state and cooled. Some were once little pieces that got cemented or squished together. Chalk (not the blackboard kind) is made of the skeletal remains of tiny organisms! And then some traces of past life get stuck in the rocks and millions of years later we see that the animals that once walked the earth are entirely different from those we have today--and yet very much the same. The whole discipline is mind-boggling!

Editing and Geology don't usually overlap. But for my editing class we have to find errors. My geology textbook is online for free; the publisher quit publishing it. That's good for me, because I get a free textbook. But I wonder if it was quit being published because there are so many errors. I could get all of my required bloopers from this book, but I'll have to ask the professor if that's OK. The biggest error I've encountered so far was in the chapter about igneous rocks. It said that mafic magma ranges in temperatures from 100 degrees to 1200 degrees Celsius. It was supposed to say 1000 instead of 100! Not only is that a difference of 900 degrees, it is saying that molten rocks are the same temperature as boiling water!