Kerrie Nairn, among other things author/publisher of Up for grabs: capture your winning market edge through creativity, will be our speaker at the meeting.
Her topics will be creativity, motivation, commitment, and things of that ilk. Should and could editors be more entrepreneurial?
Her ideas and approaches have been published in leading small-business magazines. She has played a key role in three election campaigns for her MP husband Gary, and is in demand as a presenter on ways of helping people bring greater enthusiasm, commitment and creativity to their endeavour.
Her talk is entitled 'Call of the stone: how to turn that stone in your shoe into a nugget of gold'. The venue is, as usual, the Friends Lounge at the National Library; the time, 6 for 6.30 pm. Afterwards all are invited to repair with our speaker to Mama's Trattoria, Garema Place, for victuals.
There will be a show of hands for that at the start of the meeting.
Next meeting
President's column: looking forward
One thing and another
New member
XML elements and attributes
The Book Conference
Time to smile
Need a JP?
Dates for your diary
Copyright and deadlines
A big welcome to 2003 to all readers of the Canberra Editor. In general terms, 2003 - which, for the Chinese, is mostly year 4700, the Year of the Goat, beginning on 1 February - isn't shaping up too well. We've had disastrous bushfires here in Canberra and around other parts of south-eastern Australia; a train went off the rails at Waterfall, killing seven people; the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during its descent to Earth killing seven astronauts; we remain in the grip of drought; and there seems to be a possibility that we'll go to war this year … and even that's not the whole of it. If only life were like editing, and we could rewrite the dodgy bits and completely excise the really bad stuff.
I hope that few of our members were affected by the fires in Canberra. Some were, I know. Our vice-president Kerry MacDermott, a resident of eastern Kambah, while not conflagrated, had a large eucalypt drop in on his house during the turbulence generated by the firestorm, and various other large bits of tree cause sundry damage around the block. Our secretary Ted Briggs lives on the north-western edge of Rivett, so was very close to the fires. His house escaped damage but, unfortunately, one of the family's three horses, which were kept at the Canberra Equestrian Centre next to Chapman, was so badly burnt that it had to be euthanased. They also lost their stable to the fire. I live on the western edge of Kambah, and on the afternoon of the blaze I thought we were gone. We were saved by the fire break that is the golf course of the Murrumbidgee Country Club. The fires swept along both sides of the course, leaving most of western Kambah untouched. It's enough to make you want to take up golf … well almost.
We're beginning the Society's year with something a little different. Maybe, given the bad start to 2003 in other ways, we need a bit of a kick start. So we've engaged Kerrie Nairn to speak to us on motivation, creativity, commitment and all those sorts of things. See a separate notice for details.
Our speaker in March will be the well-known Canberra author - and editor - Marion Halligan. Marion is a great fan of editors, and will have some interesting things to say about us. She can offer much praise, some criticism and some amusing stories. I'm looking forward to that.
In April, we're going to have a joint meeting with the Canberra members of the Australian Society of Indexers. The aim will be to talk about our respective roles in the publishing process, and how we can perhaps more closely for mutual benefits. A particular focus might be on training. Can the editors and indexers get together to run training sessions that will benefit not only the members of the two societies, but also people in wider business and general community seeking to gain or upgrade skills?
The accreditation working group of the Council of Australian Societies of Editors (CASE) has begun a critical phase of its work. It is now looking at various models of procedures by which editors from diverse backgrounds might attain accreditation under a national system. There are already several interesting schemes up for discussion. I would think that by May the ideas of the working group will have begun to gel, so I'm proposing that we devote our May meeting to bringing members up to speed on accreditation.
We have nothing planned yet for June, but another of our quiz nights, which have been outstandingly successful in the past, is a possibility. Any suggestions from the floor? We are aiming to hold our annual general meeting in July this year, if that is practicable in an accounting sense, and it should be since we are now operating under accrual accounting. I gather that the main reason for delaying the AGM until September in previous years was the time taken to finalise the books following the end of the financial year.
Don't forget the National Editors' Conference 2003 [I think it should be National Conference of Editors or Editors' National Conference] to be held in Brisbane on 18-20 July, when it's cold down here in Canberra. The cost of a Virgin or advance-purchase flight to Brisbane might not break the bank, and the conference accommodation costs seem reasonable. We hope to be able to subsidise a student to attend the conference. A diverse and interesting program is developing for the conference, including topics such as, intriguingly, the long-term future of the book [I think it has one], new tools for old editors [that's one I need], and the new grammar [English as she is writ(?)]. There will also be several workshops, including one on editing for the Web and electronic publications, which is sure to be a hit, so get in early if you want to sign up for that. For more details on the conference, go to our web site at <www.editorscanberra.org>. Conference organiser Robin Bennett is still seeking speakers and workshop topics and presenters. Suggestions and offers can be sent to her at <conference@editorsqld.com>.
CASE held a teleconference at the end of November last at which delegates discussed matters in train. It was very successful and saved the cost of a face-to-face meeting that was to be held in Melbourne early this year. Instead, the next face-to-face meeting will be held in Brisbane in July during the national conference, which many of the CASE delegates from State and Territory societies are likely to attend.
Lindy Shultz, who has been production editor of the newsletter for the past year, has had to resign from the position for pressing personal reasons. We much regret this. Our sincere thanks go to her for her contribution, and we look forward to continuing to see her at society functions. So we need a new newsletter production editor. Volunteers please. It's an interesting job, and we're prepared to offer some training to any potential volunteer who feels that their skill level might not be quite high enough. What any volunteer will need is a Mac or PC and a DTP package such as PageMaker, InDesign, QuarkXPress, or FrameMaker.
Can I close with a question, well a few actually? The word 'anathema' crops up regularly in the media, invariably without a preceding article e.g. 'Wildfire is anathema'. Should it not properly be 'Wildfire is an anathema', or 'Wildfire is anathemical' (the OED admits that adjective)? Do many users of the word think it is 'an athema'? Interesting. Purely by coincidence, Elizabeth Murphy's article right below this is also about articles.
Looking forward to seeing you at the February meeting.
Ed Highley
Australia is a multicultural society; many of us have the grammar of our original languages buzzing around in our heads, and we apply it to the words of our new language. The result is not always felicitous. One area that has been pointed out to me as a problem area is the use of the articles a/an and the. It's a huge and complex subject, so I'll just look at some major aspects here.
Take these three sentences for a start: (1) I would like a chocolate. (2) Thank you for the chocolate. (3) Chocolate is delicious.
Why do we use the indefinite article a in (1), the definite article the in (2) and nothing in (3)? In (1) we use a because it's the first time we talk about chocolate and we're not specifying a particular chocolate. In (2) we are talking about a specific, definite chocolate, so we use the. In (3) we're just rabbiting on about our feelings about chocolate in general - not one single chocolate and not a particular chocolate, but all the chocolate in the world, in whatever form. Bliss!
The same thing applies in the following examples: (4) He was later a minister in the government of … 1 (5) He was the Minister for Defence … (6) Ministers will be sworn in tomorrow.
There can be confusion about whether to use an article at all or omit it. Take this example: (7) The events of September 2001 have given …. impetus for a change in the relationship between the Commonwealth and the States.
Would you put an, the or nothing in the blank? If you put an, you mean just one of many impetuses. If you put the, you mean the only impetus you know of. If you put nothing, you mean impetus in a general, conceptual sense. So the article can change the meaning altogether.
We also use the article the to show specificity: (8) Jack was taken to hospital after he fell down and broke his crown.2 Jill tumbled after and visited him in the hospital.
In the first sentence there is no article because we mean the general concept of hospitalisation. In the second sentence we mean the specific hospital where Jack is.
Omitting the article can also bestow a certain importance on the noun: (9) Ed Highley, president of the society, opened the meeting.
If we put the before president, it somehow lessens the effect of the word - to me, at any rate.
Finally (but by no means exhaustively), there are some phrases that do or don't have articles in them depending on what's idiomatically acceptable: (10) in the light of …; in lieu of …; in view of …; in place of / in the place of … Sometimes it's just the author's personal choice, but from the editor's point of view, it's often a matter of consistency.
____________________
1 This and some other examples kindly suggested by Ara Nalbandian
2 This example is adapted from R. Murphy, English Grammar in Use (2nd edn), Cambridge University Press, 1994 - a reference and self-study book, particularly useful for people who have English as a second language.
Elizabeth Murphy
We welcome Keren Bisset as a new associate member of the society.
XML is based on elements that are similar in many ways to HTML elements.
An XML element begins with a start-tag and finishes with an end-tag. Most usually an XML element also has content - information that the element describes - which is placed between the start-tag and the end-tag.
When an XML element does not have content it is called an empty element; an empty element has its own syntax.
Elements
Every XML tag begins with a 'less than' sign (<) and finishes with a 'greater than' sign (>); every element has a name that begins immediately after the start-tag 'less than' sign.
XML element names are user-defined; they are not part of the XML specification as HTML tag names are part of the HTML specification. For example, in HTML <h1> is a heading tag; in XML a tag <h1> means whatever the writer of the XML chooses it to mean. It most likely would not describe the format of the content - as <h1> does in HTML - but would describe the content itself.
XML element names must begin with an underscore, a letter or a colon. By convention, XML names beginning with a colon are reserved for a particular use, which I will discuss in a future article. Following the underscore, letter or colon, an XML element name may contain letters, digits, full stops, hyphens, underscores, colons, and a few other special characters.
People new to XML would be well advised to restrict themselves to letters and digits for element names.
An XML start-tag could thus look like:
<author>
I could have used <h1> as an example here but it is most usual for XML element names to be more descriptive.
Unlike in HTML, XML names are case-sensitive. This means that <Author> and <author> are treated as different XML tags. In order to avoid confusion, one would not usually give two XML tags such similar names.
Every element must have an end-tag. In general an end-tag is the same as the start-tag but with a slash between the opening 'less than' sign and the element name. The end-tag that corresponds with my example start-tag above is:
</author>
i.e. the same as the basic start-tag with the inclusion of a slash after the 'less than' sign.
The complete element - start-tag, content and end-tag - could look like:
<author>Jim Long</author>
Content
Element content is often a complex combination of text information and other elements. Thus the element library could look like:
<library>
<book><title>
David Copperfield
</title>
<author>
Charles Dickens
</author></book>
</library>
This element thus contains the element book, which itself contains other elements.
Empty elements
If the element is empty - has no content - then the tag can be rendered thus:
<format></format>
i.e. with nothing between the start-tag and the end-tag. More simply, using the special syntax I referred to above, an empty element is rendered as:
<format/>
Empty elements can be used in an XML document for completeness. For example, the element <middle/> might be used in an XML document including authors' names when a particular author has no middle name.
Another example is:
<picture filename="cover.jpg"/>
This example element includes another part in addition to the element name. This part is called an attribute. Here there is no content because all the content lies within the start-tag itself.
Attributes
As in HTML, XML start-tags can also include attributes - information describing the tag, or metadata about the tag.
Attributes follow the name in the start-tag. Again, they are user-defined. They modify the properties of the XML element. Attributes consist of attribute-value pairs, i.e. the name of the attribute followed by an equals sign then the value of that attribute.
Thus in the example above
filename="cover.jpg"
is the attribute-value pair.
filename
is the attribute and
cover.jpg
is the value of the attribute, in this case the location and name of an image file.
No matter how complex an XML document becomes, it can always be viewed as a collection of nested elements and attributes.
Next time I will look at the structure of XML documents.
Greg Baker
The Book Conference, to be held in Cairns on 22-24 April, will address a range of critically important themes relating to the future of the book, as well as its past, and the state of the book industry, books and readers today.
Main speakers will include some of the world's leading thinkers and innovators in the areas of publishing, editing, librarianship, printing, authoring and information technologies, as well as numerous papers and workshop presentations by researchers and practitioners.
But what is the book's future as a creature of, and conduit for, human invention? Do the new media (the Internet, multimedia texts and new delivery formats) present a threat or an opportunity?
These and other issues will be explored at the conference.
Details at <http://book-conference.com/>
Helen Topor, the Publicity and Hospitality Coordinator of the Canberra Society of Editors, is offering the society and its members her services as a Justice of the Peace. Her contact details are:
Tel. (02) 6207 3414; Fax: (02) 6207 4063
email: helen.topor@cit.act.edu.au
British left waffles on Falkland IslandsTeacher strikes idle kids
Clinton wins budget; more lies ahead
Plane too close to ground, crash probe told
Miners refuse to work after death
Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
Stolen painting found by tree
Two sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout counter
War dims hopes for peace
26 February: Next meeting
28 February: Deadline for offers of papers for national conference
26 March: March meeting, speaker will be Marion Halligan
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 3 March 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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