​Five young editors win scholarships

Five women with the desire and skill to get things right in writing have won $8,500 in scholarships plus financial support to learn more at the ACES national conference.

These students in the annual ACES scholarship competition wrote an essay about editing, analyzed samples of flawed writing, and took a timed editing test. ACES: The Society for Editing raises money for and administers the competition.

The top scholarship winner, Anya van Wagtendonk of the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY), is about to intern for a digital video news startup at the Sorbonne in Paris and work on a multimedia project of her own design. She has a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale University and has already worked for the PBS NewsHour, Philadelphia Media Network, and New York Times Syndicate.

Van Wagtendonk’s scholarship is for $2,500. The other four students, receiving $1,500 scholarships, are:

• Emily DiAlbert, a junior at Ohio University who has worked as a copy editor for the Ohio Department of Public Safety, the student-run campus radio network, and the Ohio University Department of Modern Languages. She has a special interest in gender studies.

• Lee Davidson, a graduate student at the University of Central Florida. She was a graduate program specialist and editor at the University of South Florida, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in English, is a digital content editor for AACSB International, and has copy edited three books.

• Savanna Smith, managing editor of the daily news website of the University of Kansas, where she is a journalism and humanities major. In addition, she has interned for the Kansas City Star newsroom.

• Sabera Akhter, a graduate student at The George Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from George Mason University. Currently an editor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, she has been an analyst and editor for the Department of Homeland Security.

Financial support for the winners comes largely in donations from members of ACES, an alliance of editors working at newspapers, magazines, websites, Fortune 500 companies, other businesses and nonprofits, as well as freelance editors, college students, and their professors. The ACES Education Fund has awarded more than 100 scholarships to students who have a passion for editing.

For more information: https://aceseditors.org/awards/scholarships