Working with the team at A&B these past three weeks has been a great experience. For such a small team they really do amazing things! Yet even in this short amount of time I’ve noticed a few recurring side effects of gaining an editorial publishing placement, and feel that it’s only my duty to make future interns aware of just what they should expect . . .

First off, sharing the good news of your internship with uni friends comes at a price. If you were the go-to person for spelling and grammar checks before, your internship automatically makes you a proofreading authority and will open the gates to floods of dissertation-checking requests. Just don’t get so caught up in them that you forget to proofread your own!

Additionally, you’ll find yourself developing psychic powers of sorts. These will range from an uncanny ability to open books at the intended page, all the way to knowing intuitively whether a semicolon or colon is more appropriate in any given sentence (‘I can’t explain why, it just is, okay?!’)

And finally you’ll come to realise that all the proofreading has done the impossible – it’s made you even more sensitive to written mistakes in language! Newspapers and websites become a landmine, and you’ll find yourself completely relating to Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense (‘I see dodgy grammar!’)

More than anything though, an internship at A&B will give you an honest behind-the-scenes glimpse at a publishing company, and if inconsistent spellings and clumsy phrases are your calling then it will make you confident of that beyond doubt. Thanks A&B for three great weeks!

Lianna Iwanikiw, with us on work experience