Mike Mentrek was a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund/Temple intern in 1978 at The Wall Street Journal. After graduating a couple of terms later from Penn State University, he worked for several months at his hometown newspaper, The Herald in Sharon, Pa., before moving on to do copy editing and layout at The Express in Easton, Pa. In 1986, he joined The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, where today he is an assistant copy desk chief.

Thirty years on from my Dow Jones internship, I find myself with the opportunity to mentor my own paper’s summer editing interns. As I told Dr. Trayes, this experience has taught me what a meager store of insights I have to share with bright young people; and to prove my point, I offer this story: A couple of years ago I had sent a headline back to an intern to redo. I walked over to her desk and spelled out for her the problems with the original head, what she needed to refocus it on, and why. Satisfied that I had imparted sufficient wisdom, I returned to my desk, called up the slot directory . . . and found she had already sent the story back.

“The new head works,” I called over to her. “And, wow, that was really fast.”

“No,” she answered, “I actually thought of it while you were talking.”

OK, I get the point. Keep it short; we understood it the first three times you said it.

I can only second what’s written elsewhere on this site about Newspaper Fund internships. It will be a defining experience and will open eyes and doors for you among potential employers. At boot camp, yes, cram on the AP Stylebook and be humbled by the quizzes. And once at your paper, do as many jobs as you can – everything that’s asked and everything else they’ll allow. But don’t miss the chance to absorb a few things about the way Dr. Trayes goes about his dealings with others — like how much further a sense of humor and empathy will get you than snarky comments and a jaded attitude, which I’m also confident you’ll come across among your new colleagues.

So you’ll have all that. But I have two other suggestions on how to make the most of your experience.

First, read. And by that, I mean read:

* Everything in your paper — especially sections you have no interest in. This is a habit that will serve you well throughout your career. A copy editor needs to know a little about a lot of things, because inevitably a reporter versed in a particular subject will have to refer to some field he or she is not familiar with, and will make a slip. If you’ve read enough, maybe you’ll recognize the slip right off, or at least know enough to raise a red flag. And be sure to read your paper’s corrections every day. You’ll pick up valuable facts (and they’ll even be true facts!) and you may start to see how and where mistakes can be made, and think of ways to avoid those pitfalls.

* Columns by writers whose viewpoints you disagree with. You liberals, read Charles Krauthammer or David Brooks. Conservatives, read Paul Krugman. Doing this will help you pick up subtle biases in stories that you might not otherwise notice. More important, it will teach you to think critically and learn to frame an opposing argument. In sensitive stories, a copy editor needs to be able to raise questions from all sides and subject those stories to the scrutiny that will make them bulletproof.

* A book or two by a gifted nonfiction writer. (You can’t go wrong if one of them is a collection of E.B. White’s essays.) A copy editor’s ear needs to be as well tuned to elegant English as any writer’s.

And second, write.

The more you write, the better you will be able to judge the writing of others, and understand how to redirect a sentence that has gone off the tracks. So this writing will have to be something other than texting or e-mail. Wherever you are – write your impressions. And try writing with pen and paper; it will slow you down to really think about what words you’re choosing.

That’s all the advice I have to offer. And look at all the time I’ve given you to be thinking about something else.