We look forward to welcoming members of the Australian Society of Indexers to our meeting this month. With them, we will be examining opportunities for collaboration in matters such as training, and getting their views on issues such as standards and accreditation that are currently in the news with us. There will be several speakers, representing both societies, followed by a discussion session. The venue is, as usual, the Friends Lounge at the National Library; the time is 6 for 6.30 p.m. Afterwards, all are invited to dinner at Tims at the Italo-Australian Club in Forrest. There will be a show of hands for that at the start of the meeting.
The next meeting
The editor as protagonist
The President's column
Discount at City Walk Dymocks
What does love mean?
One thing and another ... a traveller's tale
www.editorscanberra.org
canberraeditors@yahoogroups.com
From the newsgroup
Style Council 2002: The digital shift
The death of the paragraph
XML namespaces
Call for expressions of interest in BELS exam
A cautionary tale
Copyright and deadlines
Marion Halligan's talk to the captivated audience at the March general meeting at the usual venue (the National Library Friends Lounge) was a highly interesting and entertaining one.
Marion started off by reassuring us that she has a lot of time for editors, but added that, like all writers, she has a strange relationship with them (us!). Her usual reaction is: 'I want them when I want them, and I jolly well don't when I don't want them!'. In her general prefatory remarks, Marion noted that the editor often has quite a different notion from the writer, and I suppose this fact is not limited to editors of fiction.
In talking about her latest published novel, The Point, Marion told us that she'd had two editors working on it. One, the publisher, did a 'very basic edit' - what we would in the profession call a substantive edit - that appealed to Marion because it presented a set of questions such as 'Why have you done this here?', 'What does this mean?', 'What happened here?' and 'Does this need to happen?'.
Marion regarded this set of questions as being essential because 'when you've written a book, you're so close to it that you're not always sure what's happening'. Sometimes the writer thinks that she has been clear about what she's presenting, but the reader may not necessarily agree. For example, in The Point the main character Jerome is writing a diary. 'What else would he be doing in passages that are written in the first person and have Jerome's name at the front?' was Marion's reaction when the substantive editor questioned her style. She then came round to the editor's view and inserted a passage to clarify that Jerome was in fact writing a diary.
Marion's relationship with the copy editor was another matter altogether! Because of absences, Marion ended up having only a week in which to address the copy editor's comments before the manuscript went to the printers. What the copy editor had done was way beyond her brief, and Marion was appalled at how much she, as the writer, had to address in that short space of time. This of course caused her to be highly 'neurosed'!
Having done what Marion considered as the basic work with the substantive editor, the novelist did not expect to be answering structural questions such as 'Is this really necessary?', to which her reaction was: 'It's absolutely essential; if you cut this scene out the whole thing will fall apart; it will come crashing down!'.
Apart from being concerned about narrators - the omniscient narrator vs Jerome - the copy editor was concerned about whether the readers would understand certain allusions, for example, the man with a red flag walking along in front of a motor car. The author, on the other hand, thinks that the whole point of reading a book is to find out about the things one doesn't know. The copy editor was also concerned about certain words, such as Jerome's having been a 'religious' (an ex-Franciscan), and whether the readers would know what this word meant without consulting a dictionary.
According to Marion, sometimes the editor is in a position of not seeing the wood for the trees because it's their job to worry about the detail. Well said, Marion!
Another point that neurosed this novelist was the way that the copy editor changed Marion's punctuation by, for example, putting in commas without appreciating the difference between the two statements 'She went home, and went to bed' and 'She went home and went to bed', or inserting question marks where none were required (in speech, what may sound like a question is not one at all, but merely the result of intonation).
The particular difficulty that Marion had was in deciding which of the copy editor's comments she should be taking notice of and which she should be ignoring. For the copy editor was sometimes right, especially when she remarked that the wrong character was in the water in a scene where one of the characters - Annabelle, a very large woman surfing in Lake Burley Griffin in a purple wetsuit in the dead of winter - falls in and her husband tries to rescue her. Marion had the husband in the water and Annabelle standing on the shore trying to pull the wind surfer out, instead of the other way round.
The extremely stressful but passionate dialogue that Marion was having with her editor, led her to start writing her latest novel with the editor as protagonist - the topic Marion had chosen for her talk. The novel is a murder story, but mercifully the editor Cassandra Travers - since she's the protagonist - isn't the one that gets murdered.
Marion treated us to a reading from her unfinished manuscript - a rather calculating move on her part, she admitted, because she hoped that we could tell her if she'd 'got the editor wrong'. She considers her picture of the editor as not being terribly accurate - it comes partly from her notion of herself as an editor too, because as a writer she has to be an editor as well. Her own self-editing is a matter of training, for instance in leaving out adjectives and adverbs, except of course when she considers them to be (absolutely) essential.
The anecdote of the 'anachronistic aubergine' was an interesting one. While reading Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders, Marion was shocked to realise that, conventions aside, the young woman narrator, who had learnt to read and write only in the last few months, mentioned in her sophisticated prose a character wearing an aubergine dress. The reason for Marion's shock was that the word aubergine did not come into the French language until the late 1760s - well over a hundred years after the period in which the novel was set. It appeared that nobody had bothered to check the word in a dictionary to make sure that it was appropriate in the context in which it was used (by a relatively uneducated girl in an isolated village who would not have even known what an eggplant was).
Marion regarded Cassandra as a very interesting character, who 'turned up' at a time when Marion was feeling disturbed at being edited herself. Marion was able to create a character or 'write somebody', as she put it, who was an editor and proud of it, and who thought that editing was an immensely important thing to do - a feeling shared by Marion, who has based the character on herself, the writer.
Ara Nalbandian
It was grand at our meeting in March to hear from someone who knows our work and speaks our own language. I have no doubt that the sixty or so members and visitors who attended the meeting thoroughly enjoyed Marion Halligan's presentation and the lively discussion that followed. Those of us who went on to dinner were treated to more of the same. Marion has promised to talk to us again when her protagonist editor is born of book.
And now for something completely different … well almost. This month we are meeting in concert with members of the Canberra chapter of the Australian Society of Indexers. This will be a bit of a show and tell on both sides, with the aim of exploring common ground and how we might work together in activities such as training, where our individual critical masses are sometimes wanting. Two or three speakers from each society will briefly tell their stories, then we'll have a general discussion on what members might see as the big issues. Meeting details are on the front page.
I don't want to pre-empt anything that might be raised on the night, but it seems to me that there is certainly a great deal of common ground between editors and indexers. For one thing, quite a few editors are also indexers, and belong to both societies. And many more of us are workers, in one way or another, on the same product. I was reading in an indexers newsletter the other day an article on the ins and outs and rights and wrongs of the use of honorifics in indexes, and it occurs to me that we even think alike. We can look forward to an interesting and productive meeting of minds.
After much discussion, your committee has decided that an effective way to publicise the work of editors, and raise the profile of the Society and the profession, would be to run a competition for the best-edited annual report for 2002-03 published in Canberra. This is a second announcement of the competition; I mentioned it first at the last meeting. Details will be forthcoming over the next few weeks, primarily through the medium of our website <www.editorscanberra.org>. Suffice to say for the moment that this will be a very significant award, attracting a superb, framed certificate and a cash prize of $1000. The competition will be open to all editors, but we are hoping for a strong showing from members of our own and the other societies of editors.
Remember the CSE membership card you got last year, which is presumably safely tucked away in your wallet? Good news. You can now use it to obtain a 10 per cent discount on all purchases at Dymocks City Walk bookshop. To get the discount, simply show your card.
The membership cards next year, i.e. from July, will have members' names on them. We will be sending out membership renewal forms in June; renew early to get your new card and maintain access to the above-mentioned discount and any other supplementary benefits that we might be able to conjure up in the interim.
The CASE Accreditation Working Group met in Melbourne over the weekend of 12-13 April. Its deliberations are at a critical phase, and we might expect that from the meeting will emerge some preferred model for developing a national accreditation scheme for editors. We look forward to the report of Janet Salisbury, our working group delegate.
Finally, check out the latest developments in the planning and program for the national conference in Brisbane in July on our website.
Ed Highley
Members of the Canberra Society of Editors are now eligible for a discount of 10 per cent on all purchases at the Dymocks Booksellers shop at 177 City Walk.
To obtain the discount, show your CSE membership to the salesperson before they ring up the bill.
The society thanks bookshop manager Sandra Groeneveld for providing this service, and for the gift voucher that accompanies this issue of the newsletter.
A group of professional people posed the question to a group of 4- to 8-year-old children, 'What does love mean?'. The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined.
See what you think:
'When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love.' Rebecca - age 8
'When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.' Billy - age 4
'Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.' Karl - age 5
'Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs.' Chrissy - age 6
'Love is what makes you smile when you're tired.' Terri - age 4
'Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.' Danny - age 7
'Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.' Bobby - age 5
'If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend whom you hate.' Nikka - age 6
'There are two kinds of love: Our love and God's love. But God makes both kinds of them.' Jenny - age 4
'Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it every day.' Noelle - age 7
'Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.' Tommy - age 6
'My mommy loves me more than anybody. You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night.' Clare - age 5
'Love is when mommy gives daddy the best piece of chicken.' Elaine - age 5
'Love is when mommy sees daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.' Chris - age 8
'Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.' Mary Ann - age 4
'I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.' Lauren - age 4
'I let my big sister pick on me because my Mom says she only picks on me because she loves me. So I pick on my baby sister because I love her.' Bethany - age 4
'When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.' Karen - age 7
'Love is when mommy sees daddy on the toilet and she doesn't think it's gross.' Mark - age 6
'You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.' Jessica - age 8
Travelling around Australia provides a wonderful opportunity to observe English 'as she is writ' for the benefit of the travelling public.
Between Canberra and Melbourne there are highway signs that tell the motorist that the hard shoulder is 'for emergency stopping only - bicycles excepted'. Where are bicycles supposed to go in an emergency? Aha! Further along the motorway, cyclists are told that they may use the soft shoulder in an emergency. Frankly, I would have thought that using the soft shoulder, which frequently means a slippery ditch, would be more likely to cause an emergency. Or can they possibly really mean that it's all right for cyclists to ride on the hard shoulder but that other vehicles can only use it for emergencies?
Roadworks abound, of course, and it's not unusual to see a notice that warns you: 'no lines marked - do not overtake unless safe'. Am I to infer that if lines are marked, it's all right to overtake, whether safe or not?
And I get a fit of the giggles every time I am told to LANE ONE FORM. Do they think I read from near to far and not from top to bottom?
Well, we arrived at Port Melbourne to drive on to the Spirit of Tasmania. Inspection of the ticket reveals a full page of the Terms and Conditions of Carriage of Passengers presented in minuscule, pale grey print. The upshot is that nobody reads this page, which is tucked in behind the ticket and the more friendly instructions. But if you don't read it, you'll never know that, according to Clause 14(a), the shipping line is not liable for anything bad that might happen to you or your vehicle, even if they cause the damage or injury. It's all in legalese, but it's there.
Safely ashore, we headed for a very cute stone cottage in Swansea built in 1860 - the sort with crooked doors and floors, and jammed with 19th-century bits and pieces. It is a delightful hideaway, but stuck to a wall is the following lulu of a single sentence, also concerning liability:
The proprietor of these premises is not liable for the loss, destruction or damage of, or to, property belonging to guests on these premises unless such property has been lodged expressly for safe custody, or, has been lost, damaged or destroyed due to some negligence or deliberate or reckless act or default of the proprietor or an employee.'
Fifty-eight words to say 'The proprietor is not liable if anything bad happens to your property unless you have expressly lodged it for safe custody or the problem has been caused by the proprietor or an employee.' [33 words]
There was a marvellous sign at a railway crossing near Tewkesbury, south of Burnie. It said 'LOOK FOR TRAINS' - not 'Look out for …' or 'Watch for …', which I could understand. I wondered what I should do with any trains I might have found, and how they had become lost in the first place!
We were amused (after we finally worked out what was intended) to read the following ditty above the toaster in the breakfast room of a B&B in Devonport:
5 is to dark, 1 is to light, Leave it on 3 and its just right. [Spelling is theirs, not mine.]
We thought better of fiddling with the toaster settings.
Memories of a hill near Camden, NSW, known to all as 'Tumbledown Dick', were stirred by the sight of signs that proclaimed first 'Break-me-neck Hill' and soon afterwards 'Bust-me-gut Hill' on the drive from Swansea to Hobart. Easy enough for us, but no doubt hard work for horse-drawn traffic.
When we'd finally mastered the complex one-way street system of Hobart, it was time to leave this beautiful island packed with history and enormous community pride, and return to Devonport and our sailing back to the mainland. We were heartened to read, by a gravel road near Great Lake, a sign that, instead of announcing a number of wearisome kilometres of winding road ahead, announced 'Winding road ends 3 km'. I call that ending on a positive note.
Elizabeth Murphy
Try a search on the web, as if you were looking for an editor. Use your favourite search engine (Google, Altavista, Ixquick or whatever) and a search phrase such as 'editors in Canberra'. You will find that the Canberra Society of Editors is up there near the top of the list retrieved. Our website, set up in mid-1998, is highly visible: the hit counter statistics show that, for the last year or so, since we changed our information provider and a new counter was installed, we have had a fairly steady eighty hits a week.
Two or three of those hits are probably the web minder's, adding or updating web pages. Some of them (we hope) may be yours, checking out the society's future program or wondering what is new on the 'Noticeboard'. But many of the hits, especially from people who arrive at the site through a search such as the one suggested earlier, will be from potential employers wondering where they can find an editor to do a special job.
What do they find? They certainly find a register of freelance editors. They also find a checklist describing the range of services that editors can offer, underlining the fact that there is more to editing than 'a bit of proofreading and correcting any obvious errors', which is what we often hear. If they want to probe further, there are a couple of years' back issues of the newsletter, an early history of the society, names and email contacts of the committee, a section on how to join the society and another devoted to the national body, CASE.
The web freelance register currently has fifty-six entries. This compares with fifty-nine in the printed register dated February 2002, but six of the editors in the print version are no longer members of the society, while others have joined the society or come on to the web version since. The fifty-six entries on the web compare with 139 financial full members of the society. We have no recent statistics (perhaps it's time for another member survey?), but we believe that about half our members are full-time freelancers and a proportion of those in salaried employment also freelance in their spare time. So there is probably scope for more to come onto the register.
Does the register work? Your web minder has been approached many times because of his web entry, reinforced by the link to his own website, on which he can give more information than the web's 250-word limit allows. So, if you are eligible and in the market for freelance work, don't miss out on this opportunity for free advertisement, one of the major benefits of membership. If you are already on the register, check your entry to make sure it is still up to date (including that ABN!). And, if you haven't done so recently, spend a few minutes to look round the website. If you think it could be improved, please contact the web minder, <peter.judge@alianet.alia.org.au>.
Peter Judge
All members of the Canberra Society of Editors are invited to join the Canberra Editors online discussion group, set up a couple of years ago exclusively for CSE members. It allows you to take part in on-line discussions on editing matters and is particularly useful when you want to ask questions of other CSE editors. It currently has only forty-two subscribers, so there's plenty of room for more.
To join, send a blank email (no need to include a subject line) to <canberraeditors-subscribe@yahoogroups.com>.
You will receive an email reply asking you to confirm your wish to join. Your name will be submitted to the moderator (Peter Judge) to confirm that you are eligible.
This is an 'unmoderated' group, in the sense that it has restricted membership but there is no control over what anybody writes. And beware! If you just click on 'reply' to an email from the group, your reply will automatically go to all subscribers, which can sometimes be embarrassing. If you want to respond to a message that has reached you through the group, but to only one individual directly, then be careful to send your message only to their email address, not to the group address.
If you ever want to unsubscribe, that's easy, too: send another
blank email to
<canberraeditors-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com>.
Peter Judge
Recently I asked two questions of people on the Canberra Society of Editors newsgroup. These are the questions, a summary of the responses and my conclusion. I am happy to enter into further correspondence either directly to me or via the newsgroup. For direct emails get me at <greg.baker@aph.gov.au>.
The question was this: "For junior, my dictionary allows: Jnr, Jr, Jun. and Jnr and the Chicago Manual of Style has Jr. For senior, the equivalents seem to be Sr, Sen. and Sr. What is preferred in Australia? And why?"
The very first answer to this was to suggest the use of Sr and Jr without full stops. And here I was, expecting this to be a difficult and lengthy discussion, and someone had a great answer straight off. The reasons given for this bit of genius was to conform with Mr and Dr (first and last letters) and to avoid unnecessary full stops.
That sounded pretty reasonable to me until another person raised the issue of how we should abbreviate sister of the nursing variety. There's always one, isn't there, prepared to throw a spanner in the works, just when it was going so nicely. They suggested that we should use sen for senior and keep Sr for sister; they referred us to Shirley Purchase's writings for support.
The response to this from my original correspondent was swift: they suggested that Sr would serve good use for both, because the title Sister (Sr) goes at the beginning, and senior (Sr) goes at the end of a name. This writer suggested that it would be possible to count on the fingers of one hand the number of times one would have to write anything like Sr Mary Jones Sr. In that case the correspondent went on, it would be necessary to write one or both out in full.
In the end I bought that, especially now that sisters of the nursing variety seem for some reason to have been discontinued. So I have decided to go with Jr and Sr from now on.
[The 5th edition of the Commonwealth Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers does give Jr and Sr as contractions for junior and senior (p. 108, section 7.11) - Editor.]
The question I asked was: "Has anyone seen the word censes as the plural of census? I've always used censuses but have come across some references to censes."
That stirred their interest, especially all the armchair Latin and Greek scholars. And what a great discussion followed.
First we had the suggestion that censes might have come from the pronunciation and that those using this as plural were constructing it as in crisis and crises. This correspondent went on to say that if this were Latin the plural would be censi constructing it as though it were a Latin noun with a masculine ending: '-i', as in filius - filii (son, sons).
The next correspondent wasn't impressed with censes or censi which I wasn't either of course; they and I at this stage still preferred censuses.
This brought the big Latin guns out. The next correspondent told us that the word census is fourth declension (of course I knew that) not second like the example filius - filii. We were told that the plural should be - as with all fourth declension nouns - the same as the singular: census.
Then it was on for one and all. One correspondent wondered if sheep was fourth declension and another wondered whether census was Latin at all. If it were Greek this correspondent opined, all our Latin discussion would be for nought. They then ducked the issue entirely and told us that if it were Greek it would be irregular and none of the rules would apply.
So, it's still censuses for me unless I can avoid the use of such an unpronounceable word altogether.
[Although neither the Oxford nor the Macquarie offers a plural form for census (which seems to indicate that census is indeed both the singular and the plural), it would be awkward to say or write 'Both census have shown a change in population'. Therefore in order to avoid fabricating a Latin plural (censi or censes) it would be preferable to create an English plural (censuses) despite a perceived clumsiness in the repetition of the s. Censuses would at least conform to Commonwealth style. The Style manual for authors, editors and printers, 6th edition, states that the English plural is preferred for Latin loan words such as curriculum, memorandum and referendum (p. 81), just as most of us would prefer forums to fora - Editor.]
Greg Baker <greg.baker@aph.gov.au>
As a conference dedicated to the 'state of the language', Style Council is never a purely academic gathering, although many of the papers delivered are based on research. Rather, it is always a very stimulating blend of principle and practice; theory illuminated by example; language as it is evolving, in use and in context.
In 2002, the focus was on language in the context of changing communication media: 'The digital shift from print to electronic media'. Held in Brisbane from 22 to 24 November, Style Council 2002 saw more than 100 participants come together to absorb and ponder a wide range of presentations.
In his keynote address, publishing visionary Richard Walsh struck several chords that were to resonate throughout the weekend.
One was his observation that the new 'e-media' have not killed 'p-media' (that's print), as forecast by some 'e-vangelists' at the end of the 1990s. In fact, like radio faced with the rise of television, 'old' media can find new niches. So the 'shift from print to electronic' can be seen as more an expansion of possibilities than a journey that leaves print behind, consigned to oblivion.
We saw evidence of this in a paper by CCH's Penny Martin that described research into the use of electronic media (CDs and websites) as an adjunct to print in educational publishing. There is a preference for print as the core medium among both students and teachers, she reported, but supplementary material in electronic form added new and valuable dimensions.
Even in the world of computer games, one of the newest of the new digital media, print has a role, according to Bond University's Jeff Brand and Scott Knight.
Another keynote introduced by Richard Walsh was an appreciation of the 'experience of reading' in different media. Reading text on screen is still inferior to reading on paper, he said, although some of the factors that currently contribute to this are becoming less relevant as screens improve and new technologies such as 'e-ink' become commercially viable. The success of e-media will then be more a function of good management and viable business models than technical constraints. 'Impractical dreams are giving way to new realities,' said Walsh.
The relationship between what readers are used to, what they're comfortable with, and what might be seen as 'efficient' or 'good' design emerged in several presentations.
Macquarie University's Jennifer Thurston, for example, cited web usability guru Jakob Nielsen's insight that for a reader the web is experienced as a whole, and an individual website is a mere speck in this universe. When a radically different web page embodying all his principles of good design was resoundingly rejected by users ('Don't expect me to learn new things just for your site!' said one), Nielsen's reluctant conclusion was that modest, incremental change is the only way to go.
Nobody touched on the 'hypertext' experience as a key difference between print and electronic media, although some insights did emerge along the way - the importance of a narrative thread, for example. 'We're currently dazzled by narrative,' said Richard Walsh. We want 'beginning, middle, end'. But for users of a web site (as distinct from a web page) the beginning, middle and end of the experience is defined as much by their own actions as by the author or publisher.
The length of text in different media is also an issue. Are electronic texts longer because they're not limited by the physical or cost constraints of print? Or are they shorter because it's more difficult to read large slabs of print on screen. The answer, it seems, is a bit of both.
A paper by Pam Peters and Adam Smith, provocatively subtitled 'the death of the paragraph?' (see below), described the first stage of a Macquarie University research project into text structure in print and online, hypothesising that structural elements at all levels (section, paragraph and sentence) would be getting smaller. Preliminary indications are, however, that although sections in e-documents may be shorter, paragraphs and sentences can be longer - often extended by devices such as bulleted lists, which are evolving as a key structural device.
There was much more. We heard about new e-lexicons emerging; SMS messaging and e-commerce; about the challenges of editing in the digital age; about the phenomenal success of Queensland University Press's venture into print on demand (POD); and about e-media and education. Access and equity - the problem of a growing 'digital divide' - was raised often by delegates as well as speakers. We were introduced to 'blogs' (weblogs), 'nicks' (chat room nicknames), 'ludology' (the study of games, particularly computer games), and 'papyro-centricity' (a 'paper-centred' world view). And the 6th edition of the Style Manual was formally launched by project leader Loma Snooks and Peter Donoughue of publisher John Wiley & Sons. A veritable feast.
Several papers are now available on the Style Council website
<www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/style/styleconf02.html>
and more are due to be published later in 2003. They're worth a close look.
Cathy Gray
Cathy Gray is a freelance editor working in both print and electronic media. She was president of the Society of Editors (NSW) from 1996 to 1999, and a member of the Standards Working Group for the Council of Australian Societies of Editors (CASE).
A version of this report has also been published in Australian Style, the newsletter of the Style Council Centre at Macquarie University; on the Style Council website; and in Blue Pencil, the newsletter of the Society of Editors (NSW).
Pam reported on research with associate, Adam Smith, relating to whether authors of online documents adapt the structure of their documents for screen reading.
The hypothesis that structural units at all levels from the section and paragraph down to the sentence are becoming smaller so that writers can communicate better on screen is being investigated. From a database of e-documents from one hundred Australian websites - fifty designed for instructional purposes and fifty for informational purposes - and computerised print documents, four instructional and four informational e-documents were selected for a pilot study.
Findings suggested that changes were only at the highest levels of text structure. Paragraphs in e-documents were fewer than for printed documents; but the average paragraph consists of more sentences, and the average sentence is somewhat longer as the use of lists, dot points and lists within lists increased. Only three-quarters of the sections used shorter sentences within the sections.
The structure and length of documents were investigated to determine whether there is a difference between the work of a specialist author and that of a generalist author. The latter use more sections and more words in their documents. Authors of instructional text use shorter sentences and fewer sentences per section, with less than 250 words per section being the benchmark. Some writers adapted their writing for the web but others used long slabs of text.
E-documents in general have more internal sections than print documents and all e-documents were more frequently sectioned with different levels to help scanning. Headings were used more often, with between three and four levels of headings. Chunks of 1580 words are often not broken up into paragraphs as the tendency grows towards larger slabs with five to six dot points.
Paragraphs are being gutted as they become less important units and clustering becomes more important.
What about punctuation? White space is used for punctuation and for marking units in horizontal and vertical planes.
The conclusion was that academics resisted structuring their text for onscreen use because long sentences and paragraphs had been their convention.
Jennifer Wright
Reprinted from the February 2003 issue of Offpress, the newsletter of the Society of Editors (Queensland ), Inc.
Readers may recall from my first piece on XML ('XML - a brief introduction', The Canberra Editor, vol. 11, no. 11, November 2002) that, in order to be valid, an XML document must be checked against a Document Type Definition (DTD) or against an XML schema.
Each DTD or schema defines elements with names that are relevant to that particular DTD or schema and ultimately of course to any XML document based on it. It is perfectly possible that two schemas - for example one defining an XML document to store information on books and another defining a document to store information on magazines - could each define the element author.
So long as each schema remains separate from any other schema and documents based on these schemas are not used together, there can be no confusion.
However, it is also possible - and often desirable - to form a valid XML document that uses the information on document structure in more than one DTD or schema.
For example, we may want to define an XML document containing books and magazines. If we want to use our ready-made schema instead of defining a new one, then we want to be able to combine elements from the two existing schemas.
This raises the question of how to combine two schemas so that there is no possibility of confusion between elements with the same name.
It is for this purpose that the designers of XML invented what are called namespaces.
At its simplest, a namespace is a collection of element and attribute names lumped together and given a collection name. In my example, each XML schema containing the element author is a separate namespace.
Readers may also recall from my second piece on XML ('XML - elements and attributes', The Canberra Editor, vol. 12, no. 1, February 2003) that element names must begin with an underscore, a letter or a colon. I said then that, by convention, XML names beginning with a colon are reserved for a particular use. That particular use is for indicating XML namespaces.
To distinguish the element author coming from each namespace we simply attach the name of the schema to the front of the element name with a colon. Thus we can have:
<book:author> </book:author>
and
<mag:author> </mag:author>
By using this method there is no confusion between elements from two schemas and any program using an XML document with both these elements will know exactly which is which.
The way in which an XML document is made aware of the namespaces that it must process is by associating the namespace names - book and mag in the example above - with what are called a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).
URIs look very much like standard web addresses. However, they are not web address at all; they are simply unique identifiers. They need to be unique so that there is no possibility that conflicts between elements from two different schemas occur - the very conflict that namespaces are designed to overcome.
The standard way that URIs are devised is to base them on the web address of the creator. Thus, I could use:
wordgraphics.com.au/names/book
as a URI for my book namespace. I know that is unique because I have based it on my web address and I am the only person who can use that web address in this way. There doesn't actually have to be a file at that address; all that is needed is that the identifier is unique. This may seem strange but for the moment that is the way it is.
Now, the way that my local name book is associated with the URI is thus:
<book:author xmlns:book="http://wordgraphics.com.au/names/book">
Next time I will talk more about namespaces and about XML schemas.
Greg Baker
Australian editors are invited to register their interest in sitting for the second BELS exam to be held in Australia.
The Board of Editors in the Life Sciences was founded in 1991 to evaluate the proficiency of manuscript editors in the life sciences and to award credentials similar to those obtainable in other professions.
Accreditation as an Editor in the Life Sciences (ELS) provides:
· qualified manuscript editors with a way to demonstrate their editorial proficiency; and
· employers and clients with a way to identify proficient editors.
Candidates sit a three-hour multiple-choice test of scientific editing in English.
In order to be eligible, you must have a bachelor's degree or equivalent and at least two years' experience as a manuscript editor in the life sciences (or four years' experience in lieu of a degree).
Registration costs US$25. To apply, you must submit a résumé, letters from employers or clients describing your employment, and copies of academic transcripts or degree certificates.
If you are accepted, the cost of registration for an exam is US$100. Full details, including an application form, are available at <www.bels.org/>.
If there is enough interest, the exam will be held in Sydney in late 2003 or early 2004. Please write to Leslie Neistadt <neistadt@hughston.com> to register your interest, or just post your application to BELS. For more information contact Matthew Stevens <mls@zeta.org.au> or Rhana Pike <rhanap@ozemail.com.au>.
Please take great care when leaving our monthly meetings now that we are at the time of year when this must be done after dark. We issue this caution because one of our members, Jeneen Mcleod, had a serious accident outside the National Library after our March meeting. In a place that is not well lit, Jeneen stumbled in a spoon drain between the footpath and a garden area as she walked from the library to the car park, causing a very serious and painful injury to one of her elbows. We very much regret this occurrence, and have sent Jeneen our best wishes for a complete and rapid recovery. Jeneen wishes to say how grateful she is to the many members who helped her at the time of the accident.
The Canberra Editor is published by
Canberra Society of Editors, PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603.
© Canberra Society of Editors 2002. ISSN 1039-3358
The deadline for the next regular issue is 2 May 2003.
Mail contributions on a 3.5 inch disk, using Word for Windows (essential) or email (preferable), to:
Ara Nalbandian
c/- Canberra Society of Editors, PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603
ara.nalbandian@defence.gov.au
If mailing, always provide a printout as well.
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