my last day

Well. Today was it. My last day of classes at Brigham Young University. No, don't worry I can't believe it either. I'm almost positive I started yesterday, but at the same time there is a good chance I have been here my whole life.

This is baby Danielle on her first day of kindergarten. I was just a teeny tiny little thing, I had pretty much 0 cares beyond what did my mom pack me for lunch? and I hope I get on the right bus to go home, and I was so excited to start school. I had no idea what I had ahead of me and all the incredible people I would meet and things I would learn through my years in school.

I remember one time in kindergarten I actually lied to my parents and told them I had homework because I was jealous of all the work that my sisters were doing. Trust me that was the first and last time I ever did that. Following that incident, I have spent most of my time pretending like I didn't have homework even if I did. (You can't get mad at me mom, I'm graduating.)

Seventeen years of school (plus some preschool) and here I am, getting ready to graduate. I've been in school for so long that it feels insane to think that this is it. (There's always a chance of grad school, but I have no plans for it at the moment.) Really though, this is what I've been doing for over half my life.

WHAT DO I DO NOW?! Oh yeah...I get a job. Still not much progress there, but I am excited willing to get serious about the hunt once finals are over (and once I take a trip to Disney World with my mom...).

What's most shocking to me about graduating is that I'm not really where I thought I was going to be at this point. When I was that precious 5 year old up there and I saw people who had graduated from college, I thought that they were so grow-up and mature. Most of the time, I still feel like that kindergartner.
When I started at BYU, I was also so positive that I was going to graduate having my life figured out, married (this idea was planted in me by the fact that my mother and sisters both were at this point), and that I would have a job. None of these things have happened. I have deviated very far from my plan, but I am happy with where I am, and I am excited to see where post graduate life will take me.

So here I am. Last day of class. Ready to tackle the world....after finals that is.

See you at graduation. I'll be the one in the cap and gown.

peace. love. and class.

my final month

I don't really have anything to say this week, so I've been putting off blogging in hopes that maybe I would come up with something to say. So yeah, I haven't.

My brain is 100% consumed by attempting to make it through this last month of school. And let me tell you, it's HARD. For real. I graduate exactly a month from yesterday. Like graduate. Like I've been in school since I was about 4, and now I'm going to be done forever. What??

So since I'm strugs on strugs trying to get all my papers/projects/presentations done, you can instead gaze upon this darling picture of my friends and I last night when we got together for some birthday love and Thai food (obviously this combination called for a break from school work).

Wish me luck this next month. I need it. I really really need it.

peace. love. and stressed out.

my figure it out Fridays

I don't have classes on Fridays which must be one of the best things that ever happened to me. Finally the English department has gotten their junk together and decided to start moving towards having no classes on Fridays. Since I have this whole extra wonderful day to get things done, I have just this past week deemed Friday, Figure It Out Friday. Since really trying to figure my life out is on my mind pretty much constantly, I thought that maybe if I dedicated a whole day to it, it would make me feel a little less mind explodingly stressed out.

So, what kind of activities happen on Figure It Out Friday?

go to the temple (my personal favorite part)

look up jobs/internships

apply for jobs/internships (my personal least favorite part)

work on making my resume perfect

work on making my portfolio perfect

email people about jobs

run errands

work on school assignments

go for drives (because I get stressed by Figure It Out Fridays and some

times I just need to relax)

and sometimes I get myself lunch (because figuring out life is hard

and I deserve it, ok?!)

and just oh so much more

Even with this whole day that I am dedicating to getting stuff figured out, it is still tough!!! Seriously what do people do with their lives when they leave college? Would someone like to employ me?? Please??? I would really like that. But, for real. If your company or a company that you know of is looking for editors or writers, I am very qualified. Since I don't edit my blog super thoroughly maybe that doesn't seem true, but in real life I'm a great editor. Trust me!

Remember that show from the 90s on Nickelodeon, Figure It Out? Don't you wish figuring your life out was like that? They just put up some blanks on a giant head, gave you clues, and then if you guessed the right words than you won really cool prizes like new roller blades? In other words why is my life not a 90s Nickelodeon game show? Instead I must dedicate an entire day, and in reality all of my brain all day everyday, to trying to "figure it out." But, let's be honest, I'm pretty sure there is almost no one who has it all figured it out. Even if you think you do, I'm sorry, but you don't (but actually if you do, tell me your secrets please).

Now, excuse me, I am going to go and try really hard to stop stressing out and try to save it for Figure It Out Friday. I'm doing my absolute best to trust that everything is going to work itself out for the best and some days that is easier than others. Woof. No matter how stressed out I get though...

this is my life and I'm happy to be living it.

peace. love. and Friday.

my last semester

I was going to clean up my room to avoid doing homework, and then I thought hey why not avoid that too. So, now I'm blogging. Oh hey. Anyways, I have just finished the very last week of my very last semester at BYU, which is quite possibly my very last week of school forever. Really this is the most insane thing ever to me. I fluctuate between: Don't make me leave; where will I go? to Can I graduate right now please?

Since I do a run through of my classes every semester, I might as well keep the tradition alive while I still can. I am taking a few classes this semester that feature literature that I have not really loved in the past, and I am doing this on purpose. It's possible that it was a foolish idea, but I actually feel very confident in my decision. I really wanted to explore some areas of literature that would be foreign to me and to develop an appreciation for them. Hopefully even if I don't necessarily love all the reading, I think I will be able to develop a respect for some literature that I have previously avoided. Why not finish off boldly? So, here are the classes that I am taking this semester.

1. Eighteenth-Century Poetry in the Age of Macroanalysis
Woof. Quite the title eh? But, it actually seems like a pretty cool class. We are studying 18th century poetry (ok, I guess that part is pretty clear from the title) but with an emphasis on using digital methods to analyze literary history.

2. Literature of the New Negro Era
This is my senior course. For the first half of the semester we read a ton, and for the second half of the semester we write a ton. Should be interesting. We are focusing on African American literature. Once again, should be interesting...

3. Young Adult Literature
This just kind of sounded easy to me and maybe like a nice break from all the heavy books I read all the time for my other classes. But, we have to read 30 books for this class. AHH! 15 of them are assigned and 15 we get to pick ourselves. I know absolutely nothing about YA Lit, so if you have any YA books that you have read and loved please tell me about them so I can add them to my list!

4. Editing for Publication: Stowaway
For my editing minor capstone I am working on BYUs travel magazine Stowaway. I love to travel, I love to edit, I love to write. It should be an all around good time, but it is also known for taking an incredible amount of time, but I mean clearly I have tons of time with this very light schedule I have..... If you want to see some existing editions of the magazine, which are actually pretty cool, you can go to www.stowawaymag.com.

5. The English Novel
Only one presentation and one project and a couple of reading journals and other than that just reading really good books and chatting about them in a class of only 9 people. Woohoo! It is a ton of reading, but it seems like it is going to be a very rewarding class where we will read some truly fantastic literature, and where I can focus on reading and enjoying rather than analyzing to death (but with some theory thrown in. uhg). Classes like this though are sometimes the ones that make me most glad that I am an English major. Have fun with your textbooks while I read beautiful novels. (Of course, you can be the one to laugh when I am poor, dangit. haha.)


I really do love my major, and I wouldn't have picked anything else if I could go back and do it all again. It is more challenging than many realize, but also so much more rewarding than I could have ever realized. It is a heavy load with four English classes and my capstone, but with roomies like these ones below to help em through I am positive I will thrive...ok maybe at least survive?

peace. love. and English.

my Provo printing

This weeks adventure kept me right here in Provo at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum. I actually went with my editing class this Saturday for some extra credit, and who knew I had been driving past this little gem on center street and have never known about it?! So, yeah I am going to own up to some of my nerdiness here a little bit. They have a bunch of old working printing presses including a model of a Gutenberg printing press. Obviously when they asked for someone to volunteer I was all about it.

I don't just say this because I am an English major and I am obsessed with books (really though I would live inside of Barnes and Nobel if they would let me), but printing is the greatest invention ever. Without our civilization and societies would never have been able to explode the way they did, so I was glad to enjoy a little piece of this history last weekend. So, if you are looking for a fun and educational Provo activity, I would highly recommend taking a tour at the Crandall museum.
Let me know if you have heard of or experienced any other little Provo gems!

peace. love. and printing presses

my course load

Maybe this interests you, maybe it doesn't, but I thought it could be fun to give you a run down of my course load for this semester.


Textbook Editing-- Whoa whoa, try not to get too excited about this one, I know it sounds thrilling. No, but really I think it will be a good class. The teacher seems great, and also seems very willing to link textbook editing to other realms of editing. I just really can't see myself editing textbooks, because I think experience has shown that I tend to get really sleepy and/or find myself on doing anything besides reading my textbook when I am supposed to be doing that.

Digital Culture--So excited about this class. This is literally a class where we blog. Stop it. Did they make this class for me? It's a bit of a secret dream of mine to be blog famous one day, so maybe this class will give me some useful skills to getting me a little closer. But, pretty much this class is exploring the digital age and what this does to/for the humanities. We exploring this through a mixture of reading Moby Dick, blogging, google+, and various other resources. (The group blog I am posting on is www.teamqueequeg.blogspot.com in case you are interested in hearing about my thoughts on Moby Dick and digital culture.)

American Literature from 1885-1914--Hi Mark Twain how's it going? This class will explore literature from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of WWI. This is the era of short stories and I love a good short story (plus it will be nice to have at least one class where I can focus on shorter pieces rather than novels so I hopefully don't get too reading overwhelmed).

Post Modern American Literature (1960-Present)--I have studied so many classics in classroom settings that I think it will be really interesting to study some modern works. We have a lot of novels to work out way through this semester, but ultimately I think it will be very rewarding.

Psychology 111--My very last GE! There are a lot of freshmen in that class, so I've kind of decided that it's probably most safe that I talk to no one in there in fear of accidentally getting asked out by a freshmen. Plus, if my Uncle Ken taught me anything when I came out to BYU, it was never meet a boy in a 100 level class. But, it will be a nice break to have this one class that is a departure from all my English and editing.


Well there it is. I for sure have a full load, but it's my senior year, I should be an expert at this college thing by now, right? RIGHT??? (goodness I hope so)


peace. love. and school work.

my first editing job

I am employed! I got a job this week as a researching and editing assistant and I am pretty excited about it. It should work well with my school/fun schedule since I work about 20 hours a week and set my own hours. So, pretty much I work whenever I want, but if I don't have time I can cut back for the week, or if I decided to go home for a little bit to visit my darling nephew and soon to be nephew than I can keep working from home.

But...this also means that I am now pretty much a full time Provo resident. Yup. I am pretty sure this means I am staying Spring and at least most of Summer. I haven't talked to the professor I'm working with yet to work out the logistics, but I am guessing that I will need to be in Provo for at least parts of Summer. Oh well, hit me up at King Henry ya'll. 

Here are my new roomies. I went 100% random and I am trying really hard to be a social person (harder for me than you might think. haha. 

#firstsunday

peace. love. and employment.

my very own website

In the midst of finals, I really have no thoughts other than what I have been studying. So, like last week, I am going to share another one of my final projects. This is my final project for my Internet Publishing class. I took this class to start stepping myself into the world of internet publishing and editing and never knew how much I would love it. Yes, I have solidified my title as a nerd by saying that I enjoy coding and writing websites, deal with it. For our last project we had to think-up, code, and design our own website. I went more practical than creative and built a site to act as an online portfolio for my editing. My site is very far from being perfect, but I will brag a little and tell you that my teacher did say that my website was "brilliant in its simplicity and design." He also presented it to the whole class, so I mean feel free to be impressed with me. But, actually my site still needs so much work, but I am proud of the effort that I put into it. So, to prove whatever skill I have in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (very limited skill really...) follow this link to see my online portfolio...http://nongrat.us/chum/250/2013.01/students/cronquist.danielle/final_project/website.html

This internet publishing class has gotten me thinking a lot about redesigning the blog...but you're going to have wait a few months till I'm done with school for that. 

peace. love. and websites

my editing essay

The last two days of school and finals week are upon me, so I decided to do a bit of a cop-out and post an essay that I wrote for my editing class. Many of you probably know that I dream of one day being an editor, and this essay is a little more about that. Since this essay is a bit longer than most of my blog posts, I included some music by the band High Highs for you to listen to while you read.

Becoming an editor. A really good editor.

             I decided that I wanted to be an editor when I was sixteen, and I’ve stuck with it. Sophomore year in high school may seem a little early to be deciding what I want to do with my life, especially since most people are still confused by sophomore year in college, but I’m the type of person who makes big decisions and sticks with them, and I decided I wanted to be an editor. A really good editor. I’ve shared my dream with a lot of people, and I almost find it a little odd that many people react in the same way: “Yeah, I can see that. I can see you as an editor.” As much as this is my dream, I don’t think I share the same image of “Danielle the editor” that others immediately get. Even though this is my dream, I feel like this image is so far away from me. But, there is one thing that I’m confident in, whether I have that fully formed image yet or not, I’m going to be great at editing, because I commit to things. Five years ago, I committed to being the greatest editor I can be, and I refuse to disappoint myself or anyone else who has ever had that vision of me, taking over the world of writing one Oxford comma at a time.

             I didn’t really know what an editor was when I decided that I wanted to be one. It seems silly now that I would have chosen a life I didn’t know anything about, but editing does fit me surprisingly well. What is an editor? is a question that I have been discovering the answer to as I have started taking editing classes, looked into editing internships, and begun doing editing projects of my own, but what makes a good editor? That’s what I’m trying to find out, and I suppose to be a great editor one must first figure out what great editing is. 

            I think that to edit you have to know how to write. You have to know how incredibly painful it is to write. When I’m sitting at my desk at 2 a.m. staring at a blank page—because my writers block never breaks until about 4 a.m.—I always think of a quote that I once read from Kurt Vonnegut: “When I write I feel like an armless, legless man, with a crayon in his mouth.” This quote never fails to remind me that I’m not the only one who suffers when it comes to writing. Writing is really hard, and I think that’s important to remember when you’re editing someone else’s work. What I am about to attack with my editing marks, the author worked really hard on, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect.  Letting other people edit my own work, work that I put so much into, is even harder, but I also acknowledge that it’s almost impossible for me to edit my own writing. After all, why would I want to tear apart something that I worked so hard on in the first place? But, it’s for the best. It always is.

            I wrote my first real essay in the fourth grade; it was about panda bears. I wrote my first good essay sophomore year, it was about Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (apparently it was a life changing year when it comes to me and the written word). Since then, I have dedicated myself to trying to figure out writing: updating a weekly blog, writing for one of Brigham Young University’s student journals, and writing essays that I keep hidden on my computer’s hard-drive. It’s taken some time for me to figure writing out, and of course I’m still figuring it out, but learning how to write is something that I have worked hard on, so that I can be an editor. A really good editor.

            The next step in becoming a good editor is knowing the basics, those fundamental principles of grammar that start in grade school where you discover nouns, and verbs, and adverbs, and develop in later years into prepositions, and pronouns, and modifiers. Brigham Young University’s editing minor starts with the basics: breaking words down, breaking sentences down, breaking skills down that you thought you had already mastered in grammar. There are three to four grammar classes that I had to take before taking the class Basic Editing Skills. This has made it clear to me that to be a good editor, you have to know your grammar, and you have to know it well. It was a little daunting reading from The Copy Editor’s Handbook “In many ways, being a copyeditor is like sitting for an English exam that never ends: At every moment, your knowledge of spelling, grammar, punctuation, usage, syntax, and diction is being tested” (Einsohn 4). I finally feel validated in all the hours that I spent diagramming sentences for Ms. Walker’s sixth grade English class, so that maybe those hours can one day help me pass this “test” of the editing world.

When going through my editing classes, I really struggled in my Modern American Usage class, and for a summer I thought this meant that I wasn’t going to get to be an editor. For awhile, I thought my dreams were dashed—that the sixteen year old me had made a bad decision—and I started looking into other majors and minors and other professions, but I didn’t want any of them. I just wanted to be an editor. I looked back at what I had failed to learn in that class; and I learned it, because if those were the skills that I needed to be an editor, and if that was the knowledge that I needed to have, I was going to master it. I still slip up on my grammar. Please don’t get nervous as soon as you hear I am an editing minor, and assume that I will catch your every mistake. It actually doesn’t matter to me that you used the wrong version of your/you’re in that text, because I make mistakes all the time too, but I’m learning how not to so that I can be a good editor. A really good editor.

Once you learn what the rules are, it’s time to learn how to break them. Beautiful writing does not pass every rule in the grammar book. A lot of the time, what makes writing beautiful is that it dares to reject the rules and create its own. As an editor, you can’t take this away from the writer. As M. Lincoln Schuster explained, “Don’t worry too much about the mistakes you make deliberately, that is, disappointments and failure that may come from taking a calculated risk. Editing and publishing are risk-taking professions—sometimes they are wild gambles” (Gross 25). I hope that as an editor I get some chances to take risks and to let things that don’t work technically work lyrically. Perhaps sometimes this will fail, but sometimes it will be brilliant. And being a good editor means letting writing be brilliant, even if it breaks the rules.

To me, editing someone else’s writing is a lot like putting on make-up in the morning. It’s not what makes you pretty, but it sure can make you prettier: When you edit, you aren’t going to be what makes something great, but you sure can make it greater. I know I’m going to be a good editor because I want it. I want to be the person that makes writing greater. Williams said, “Editors themselves will remain subject to the ‘joy, fulfillment, grief, and frustration’ of their craft, hoping that their ultimately invisible labor will make a real and positive difference” (Gross 9). This is what I can see ahead of me. Editing will bring me great joy and great misery, but this is what I want. I want to be an editor and I want to be everything that comes along with that title.

If I think about it, I can see what others see when they get a vision of me as an editor, and I’m not going to let that vision get away from me. I’m willing to work for it, and I’m willing to do what it takes to get there. There is still so much about the world of editing that is mysterious to me. I don’t have any personal friends who are editors, and I don’t have family members who have told me all about it, so I feel like I’m forging my own path, but that’s also what makes it exciting to me. I did a lot of dumb things when I was sixteen—like we all did—but I did one thing right. I decided I wanted to be an editor, and I’ve been working towards that ever since. I won’t stop now. I am going to be an editor. A really good editor.

peace. love. and dream jobs.

Works Cited

Einsohn, Amy. The Copyeditor’s Handbook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Print.

Gross, Gerald, ed. Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do. New York: Grove Press, 1993. Print. 

my major major gripe session

Please excuse me for a moment, or a few moments, while I complain...    

     A lot of times I feel like people look down on my major. The most common reaction I get is generally "oh so you want to be an English teacher." As if this is the ONLY possible thing that one could do with their English major. Really? An English major is actually a very flexible major that can lead into the fields of writing, editing, publishing, teaching and research, advertising, public relations, law, and even finance. Obviously in many circumstances graduate school will be required, but really there are few jobs that do not expect you to go to graduate school, given the steady increase in competitiveness in the work force. Not to mention, that in any career, advanced analytically and writing skills are an immense help.
     I also feel as though people often see my major is one of the "easy" majors and that it is not near as great a challenge as some of the business, sciences, etc. Every course is rigorous in its own way and until you have actually gotten a degree in every major, I think your opinion of which major is "the most difficult" is horse poo.
    Lastly, I would like to share this article about editors (since that is what I want to do) to send my point home. I found this article very interesting and highly recommend giving it a looksie. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705392032/Million-dollar-typos-cause-worldwide-losses.html

For anyone reading this, it is in no direct rebuttal to anyone's comments and I mean offence to no one. This is rather a complaint of a collection of comments that have annoyed me for some time.