I am terrible at English and design

Recently I got moved to the sub-editing desk for a three-month stint. It is compulsory for all reporters in the newsroom, presumably so that us frontline grunts will get to know better the news production process.

So for the past week I've been doing subbing hours, which for my paper means going to work at 4.30pm and reaching home at around 3am. It means sitting on a van with other owls on a long and very roundabout way home (unless of course the driver thinks yours should be the first stop). It means walking through the very dimly-lit distance between my home gate and the door and crossing a long, quiet and lonesome living room, up wooden stairs cool to bare feet, feeling that special kind of desolation that comes to one at 3am in the dark.

I'm not going to proofread the above paragraph even though it is probably full of errors because fuck that, ok.

I know it is because my subbed copies and my Chinese translations are awful. I blame the Chinese translations actually. How do I write succinctly when I don't understand half of what I'm reading? And constantly flipping a dictionary wastes too much time. The subbing team is the final line in a newsroom. It also works on tight deadlines. I wish I had paid more attention in class.

Also, I totally suck at arranging the elements on a page. And I have a sore neck.