Arianna D’Italia, College fourth-year and English and Psychology major, has been production manager for the past year. Possessed with an almost supernatural ability to spot the single misplaced em dash buried in 2,000 words at 1:47 a.m., she tweaks sentences with intense precision. She has kept the production room running through deadline delirium, printer catastrophes, and collective existential crises. As a humble section editor, I can only bow before the magic she weaves at the Review: part architect, part mechanic, part sleep-deprived oracle of AP style.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What first drew you to the *Review* and how did you end up in production?

Over Winter Term in my sophomore year, I saw an ad in the Campus Digest that they were looking for production editors. I am an English major, so I’ve always really enjoyed language and editing. I was raised with a mother who cared a lot about using correct grammar. So a lot of that was really drilled into my brain from a very young age. I thought that the *Review* could be a place where I would get to use the knowledge that was all just rattling around in my brain without that much of a purpose. 

How do you think working at the *Review* has affected you or changed you in your time here?

I think it’s given me the opportunity to meet a lot of people who I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Particularly underclassmen who I’ve become really good friends with over the last few years, who really helped me become more in tune with what was happening on campus. I’m typically the first of my friends (who don’t work at the Review) to know what’s going on because of the articles that we read every week. So it’s helped me feel like more a part of campus.

What does a production editor usually do that most people don’t realize they do?

I think that people often think that production is just putting commas in different places, and that is a little bit of it. But fact-checking is also a big part of it. Literally everything that is presented as a fact in the *Review* has to be checked with verified sources. We need to be checking the spelling of everyone’s names and making sure that we’re using people’s pronouns correctly and attributing people’s titles correctly. If we don’t, that really diminishes our credibility as a newspaper because the people we’re writing about are going to see the article. We have a 35-page style guide in which basically everything that you could potentially be writing about on Oberlin’s campus has a rule about it. It helps everything look really standardized and professional across the board.

Describe a classic production night! What will you miss?

A classic production night on Thursday involves a lot of people in the section room and a lot of running back and forth between them and the production room, asking questions to the section editors and figuring out anything that needs more pairs of eyes or is controversial. Trying to figure out the best way to word certain things. A lot of asking the section editors when their pieces are going to be in and platitudes from the section editors that they will be ready soon. Makela’s orange and green gummy worms that she always lets the rest of us eat because she doesn’t like them. Some of my favorite people work on Thursday nights, so a lot of hanging out with my friends who I care very deeply about. Watching the time click closer and closer to midnight, and wanting to leave and never wanting to leave.

What is the most absurd or crazy thing that happened while putting an issue together?

Oh, God. I don’t know if I can remember everything. It was pretty crazy when we had a number of pieces fall through at about one in the morning, from student writers to adults who weren’t comfortable with us publishing them. Having to readjust when that happens is definitely chaotic.

I know there’s a specific instance when something fell through and you stepped in and shared an article to fill the gap. How did it feel to be part of the chaos and also part of the solution?

I think that was one of my proudest moments at the *Review*. It was an article that I’d written for an ExCo that I didn’t really expect to do anything with or to be seen by a lot of people. But the other option was for the Opinions editors to write a whole new piece at 1 a.m., which I did not think sounded feasible. I think I was really nervous also because that’s still the only article that I’ve ever written for the Review. I really cared about that article specifically  because it’s about something that’s really important to me that I was really proud to share with a wider audience. It was about experiences of OCD that aren’t talked about as widely. And the week after the article was published, someone emailed me and said that they were so happy that it had been published and that it was really meaningful to them to see an experience like theirs in the *Review*. Receiving that email was everything to me. That was exactly why I had decided to publish that.

What advice would you give the next generation of editors?

I think that we have a great incoming team of section editors and I think that we’ve built positive relationships with section this year. And I think that maintaining those relationships is important because the communication between section and production is so essential. If that’s not there, everything else can break down really quickly. So I would  say hi to the section editors and learn their names and talk to them. Sometimes it can seem a little scary when you’re starting in production to go into this big room with all these people, all these things on the walls, and all these people you don’t know and ask someone a question, but it’s really important to be able to do that. And have fun! Most people who end up as production editors genuinely enjoy it. And I think it’s good to remember that.

And lastly, do you have a favorite punctuation mark that you identify with?

I’m tempted to say the semicolon, but only in very limited quantities because too many semicolons is a lot. So, the occasional semicolon, I would say.