Messieurs, mesdames, mesdemoiselles: veuillez venir nombreux à l'Assemblée Générale (please come in droves to our AGM and dinner), which will be held in the Aegean room of the Hellenic Club in Woden on Woden's day (see Thinking about words below!), 27 July, at 6.00 for 6.30 pm.
The night will have a French theme, so come as your favourite French personality: author, actor, singer, politician. There'll be a quiz or two to keep you amused and prizes for those who guess right most often!
And of course, there'll be the important business of electing the new committee - almost all the committee positions will be up for grabs. All will be revealed on the night, so come and participate in the excitement!!! A nomination form is on our website.
For a modest $38 you'll get a delicious 3-course meal, including tea or coffee with chocolates - and even some free drinks.
IMPORTANT: the Club needs final numbers for dinner by Friday 22 July. So RSVP before then to Ara.Nalbandian@defence.gov.au or tedbriggs@webone.com.au.
We would really appreciate payment in advance by cheque or money order to The Treasurer, PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603.
If you prefer, you can pay on the night but NOT IN CASH please - by cheque or money order only.
A très bientôt, chers collègues et amis, et bien cordialement.
Next meeting
From the President
From the editor's desk
IPE notes
The world of paper
Training notes
New members
Minding my p's and q's
Track changers - James Dixon
Thinking about words
IPE accreditation news
Copyright and deadlines
Dear fellow members,
Not a lot to report from your committee this month. Arrangements for the Annual General Meeting and dinner have now been made. If you want to join us for the dinner you will need to book so that we can finalise catering numbers. (See all details in the column at left.)
Our meeting in June was very informative and entertaining. Gary Wilson from Spicers gave us a practical runthrough on the subject of paper, with a clear explanation of how paper is made and some pointers on the different characteristics of various types and grades. Very useful if you are involved in more of the publishing process than the editing of the words.
Lee Kirwan won the door prize, which was organised as always by Ted Briggs. In the time for questions from the floor, we discussed the growing use of phrases such as '(something) is able to be done', and how to go about organising ABNs and registration of business names. The meeting was followed by a delicious and convivial curry dinner in Manuka.
Membership renewals are due, and meanwhile we continue to attract a steady flow of new members. If you are currently an associate member but you are eligible to become a full member, just send me or the Vice-President, Ted Briggs, an email with evidence that you are now working as an editor. We will arrange for it to be assessed. Among other benefits you will then be able to advertise your services on our web Freelance Register, which potential clients certainly seem happy to use. You could also hold office on the committee.
Finally, whether you are a full member or an associate, if you haven't already done so, think about nominating for the committee - or nominate someone else, if they agree.
See you at the AGM!
Claudia Marchesi, President
I have worked with Ara Nalbandian for some time now, over several series of articles I have submitted to this newsletter. Ara has prodded me to think more clearly about some aspects of my writing; he has insisted on consistency of usage and style; he has turned sometimes turgid prose into something readable; he has, in fact, made me and my writing look good. Ara has been, to me, an editor's editor, and I will miss his monthly phone call to ask about 'just a few little points'. He has invariably been right to question what I had written.
Thank you, Ara, for your insights and your courtesy. Good luck for the future.
Elizabeth Manning Murphy
If I could tell you last month that the June newsletter was my penultimate one, why can't I now tell you that this is my ultimate column? Well I can, but would it be better to say that it's my final or my last column? Probably so, because last is much shorter and final is slightly shorter than ultimate - and our current obsession with using the shortest word possible would probably make last the best choice.
Stepping down from the editor's position fills me with sadness. I've enjoyed the work, although not always the process. There have been some difficulties and the work involved in producing each issue is considerable. I hope that you've enjoyed reading the newsletters in the past three years as much as I've enjoyed preparing them.
I've now finished editing the eighth edition of the Freelance Register. Louise Oliver is proof-reading it at the moment, and Ed Highley will start to do the layout in the second week of July. So we anticipate that the FR will hit the streets at the end of the month.
Bye from me!
Ara Nalbandian
The task of forming a national body to serve the needs of eight independent societies of editors raises many questions, both legal and practical. For instance, should it be an incorporated body, and which state has the most suitable requirements for incorporation? What sort of activities is the new body likely to engage in? The National Organisation Working Group, convened by Haya Husseini of Victoria, will soon be circulating an Issues Paper that examines these topics. The societies are asked to hold workshops in August or September to consider the Issues Paper, and with any luck the feedback will be compiled in time for discussion at the Melbourne conference in October.
As the Victorian committee moves into the final stage of planning for the Melbourne conference, the Tasmanian society is already hard at work on the next interstate extravaganza. Their conference committee, which has been meeting since last November, has set the dates for 2007. Fill in your Coming Events calendar with these: the main conference is in Hobart on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 May, with forums and workshops on the Saturday.
The Standards Revision Working Group was set up to review the use of Australian Standards for Editing Practice (2001) by editors, employers and the education and training sector. The review has been suspended for the moment pending a fuller understanding of the requirements of the accreditation scheme, which will test applicants against the Standards in order to grant accreditation. This use of the Standards has various ramifications, and the revision will go ahead when the requirements are clearer.
At present the Institute is making a huge national effort, with volunteers committed to eight committees and working groups: the Institute itself; the Accreditation Board; the initial panel of assessors; the National Organisation Working Group; the Promotions Working Group; the Standards Revision Working Group; and state committees for the conferences in 2005 (Victoria) and 2007 (Tasmania).
Despite all the contributions, we are conscious of neglecting some important areas. We could use a fairy godmother with a bottomless bucket of money and a truckload of workers.
The training of editors needs attention - the Institute would like to coordinate and improve the training offered by the societies, and to work with education and training providers to ensure that the courses they offer match the needs of industry. A program to mentor junior and novice editors is also on the wish list.
Perhaps the surge of enthusiasm that is being generated by the Melbourne conference will provide the volunteers, if not the money, to make a start in these areas.
Janet Mackenzie, Liaison Officer,
<www.case-editors.org>
And that's exactly what Gary Wilson did at the society's general meeting on 29 June. The self- confessed AAA-rating customer in all cocktail bars from Helsinki to La Paz, Gary is now the national manager of Paperpoint, a division of Spicer Paper. With a staff of twelve, Paperpoint is the only paper merchant in the ACT that has warehouse and office facilities. After talking briefly about the company he works for, Gary gave a basic overview of paper making. Paper's made from pulp fibre, filler, dyes and optical brightening agents, sizing agents, and coating. Pulp fibre or cellulose is tubular and is found in all plant life. Wood is the best source, with soft woods providing long fibres; and hard woods, short fibres.
Coating - which consists of clay, calcium carbonate, latex, starch, thickeners and sundry chemicals - is the application of mineral pigment to paper; it improves surface quality and smoothness. The coating of paper allows better dot reproduction and thus a better print result. Also, the ink is held out on the surface, and this creates ink gloss. With uncoated papers there's limited ink gloss as the ink tends to penetrate into the surface of the sheet. High levels of coating make paper glossy by giving it a reflective surface, as do calendering (mechanical smoothing and replication of a steel surface under pressure), and alignments of the clay and calcium carbonate pigments on the surface.
A paper machine consists of a wet section, a press section, a drying section, a size press and calenders. There are three different styles or classifications of paper: A1, A2 and A3, with respective coating weights of 18+, 12-18 and 8-15 grams per side. Matt, satin, silk and dull papers also have coat weights. Manufacturers use very coarse coating pigments that resist glossing.
Gary went on to talk about Spicers Paper and the environment. In an age when business is accountable not only for profit and growth but also for its impact on the environment, green choices are intelligent choices. According to Gary, with Spicers paper, even red-hot designs can benefit from being green. Five environmental symbols are used to label paper: Recycled, Environmental Management Systems (EMS), Wood Fibre from Sustainable Forest, Totally Chlorine-free (TCF) and Elemental Chlorine-free (ECF).
Recycled paper may consist of pre-consumer or post-consumer fibre. Pre-consumer fibre is collected from waste paper that never reached its intended end-users, as well as from offcuts from printers and packaging manufacturers. Post-consumer fibre is taken from waste paper that reached its intended end-users - milk and juice cartons, and material recycled from offices. In many cases there are no differences in pre- and post-consumer waste. Pre-consumer waste is an ideal resource for making papers of higher brightness. In general pre-consumer waste is likely to be less contaminated than post-consumer waste. Paper containing recycled fibre is not normally inferior in its properties. Recycled fibre that is properly treated and from an appropriate source can be used to make high-quality copy paper that is indistinguishable from paper made from new fibre. For example, Tudor Rp, an offset paper, is made from 100 per cent recycled fibre. Research has shown that paper can be recycled only five times before its fibres start to break down, so recycled fibre must be combined with 'virgin' or new fibre. The main benefit of recycling fibre is that it reduces the amount of paper dumped in landfill. In Australia over 1.5 million tonnes of paper is kept out of landfill every year.
EMS. Selected Spicers papers are certified by leading global EMS systems: ISO 14000/01 International Standard for organising and achieving continual improvement, Integrated Pollution Prevention Control (IPPC), Nordic Environmental Swan Label (awarded by the Environmental Labeling Board of the Nordic Council of Ministers, and the European Union's Eco-management and Audit System (EMAS).
Wood Fibre from Sustainable Forest. Spicers Paper's current suppliers are recognised producers of paper made from wood fibre that is sourced from sustainable forests. Paper comes from integrated and non-integrated mills. The latter have to provide a written commitment stating that their wood pulp is sourced from suppliers harvesting wood fibre from sustainable forests.
TCF is the pulp-bleaching process that avoids the use of all chlorine - in elemental or compound form. In its attempt to use bleaching agents other than chlorine, the industry is exploring alternative bleaching chemicals such as oxygen, ozone and hydrogen peroxide.
ECF is as environmentally friendly as TCF. The bleaching process used does not produce elemental chlorine. A form of domestic household bleach is used that does not produce dioxins, which are the killers.
It is heartening to know that we've been making recycled papers in Australia for over thirty-five years.
Ara Nalbandian
Saturday, 16 July: Working with designers and printers.
Saturday, 13 August: Proofreading.
All the information about these courses is on our web notice board at www.editorscanberra.org/notices.htm
The society welcomes new full members Tim Armstrong, Anne Cullinan, Christine Roffey and Meredith Thatcher, and new associate members Catherine Busby, Lee Ellwood, Maxine James and Brent Perkins.
Is there any editor who doesn't consult a Pam Peters work at least once a day? I have the Macquarie Dictionary and the Style Guide (6th edn) handy all the time - she contributed to the compilation of both. Other works include The Cambridge Guide to English Usage and The Cambridge Australian Style Guide, not to mention her regular contributions to the text or management of such periodicals as Australian Style and Australian Language and Literacy Matters. Professor Pam Peters (Macquarie University) is a respected and highly knowledgeable linguist, author and editor, and brings her wealth of experience and loads of commonsense to her latest work A Word on Words.
Unlike some of her other works, this book is a mere 90 pages, but what a variety of information is crammed into that small space! In this collection of essays, culled from her contributions over the years to Australian Language Matters (Language Australia Publications), she discusses many language issues: how words enter the lexicon and constantly change the meanings of words, dealing with numbers, the influence of technology, spelling and punctuation, grammar and word forms, cultural differences, and even the alphabet we use to put words together.
The author discusses the origins of words in English, including how many are borrowed from other languages (I wonder why we 'borrow' - I've never heard of any being given back). She looks at the impact that technology has had on our language, and includes an essay on the development of the spelling of Email, E-mail, email, e-mail. The natural progression from hyphenated word to one word seems to have been halted in its tracks - the trend is apparently to adopt e-mail as the correct spelling.
Political correctness in writing comes in for discussion - terms such as follicularly challenged, for bald, and hearing impaired, for deaf, are debated. The people concerned tend to choose the simple word to describe themselves, and Pam Peters questions the need for many of the more longwinded p.c. terms, except in the case of racist and other discriminatory terms that can be offensive.
The use of hyphens to join up compound words like baby-sitter and pick-me-up is explained and contrasted with the use of hyphens in complex words formed with prefixes, including anti-intellectual and co-ed. In the latter two, the hyphen helps the reader to pronounce both of the vowel sounds on either side of the hyphen. Continued use of these words frequently results in the eventual dropping of the hyphen, as in cooperate.
Among the many essays of which this book is composed are some devoted to aspects of English grammar, including the past tense of certain verbs, such as sing, sink, shrink - sang/sung, sank/sunk, shrank/shrunk (and here she cites the overwhelming use in America of the irregular shrunk, which, as she says, 'went round the world in the 1990s in the movie title Honey, I shrunk the kids'. Other grammar issues dealt with include the perennial me or my choice in sentences such as Count on me being there or Count on my being there. It seems that there is an amazing difference between American usage and Australian usage, with Americans plumping for the possessive form while Australians are more likely to opt for the accusative form.
Words that disappear don't often make a comeback. However, there is a trend, which I too have noticed more and more quite recently, for the word gotten to be used now in Australian speech. According to Pam Peters, the word has for a long time been regarded as an Americanism, continuing as it did in American English while being dropped from British English. It is now reappearing in British newspapers and in some non-fiction publications. It is certainly back in colloquial speech in Australia, but whether it has made it to the newest crop of books or other publications is still unclear. However, as Pam remarks, '… there's evidence enough to show that gotten can no longer be dismissed as an Americanism. It seems to be reclaiming its place in English worldwide'.
This book is a notable addition to the literature on usage. While it is based on solid linguistic and grammatical principles, it is written in a style that only a great communicator and writer can achieve - a style that makes a huge variety of often complex topics totally clear to the lay reader. It is an absorbing book, and one that will find its place on my handy reference bookshelf. Read it from beginning to end or dip into it. It is introduced by the ABC's Kel Richards, himself a wordsmith of note. He remarks that 'Pam Peters explains why policing English is about as practical as nailing jelly to a wall'. We have to recognise that English is changing all the time, and as editors it behoves us to be aware of the changes and decide how to cope with them in our work - giving a whole new spin on minding our p's and q's!
A Word on Words is by Pam Peters, and is published by CAE Press, Melbourne 2005. The illustrations, including the cover and highly pertinent cartoons throughout, are by Judy Dunn. ISBN 1 876339 39 X. RRP $19.80.
© Elizabeth Manning Murphy 2005
James Dixon talks to Louise Forster about his life in publishing, editing and other things …
How did you become an editor?
James: It's been a strange and circuitous route to editing for me. A lot of my jobs have involved writing and editing, without that being the major designation of the job.
It all started at uni. I went to the University of New South Wales in the first half of the 1970s. I was a bit of a student politician and I ended up being the director of student publications, with responsibility for the production of Tharunka. That familiarised me with typesetting. Later on I went teaching for a couple of years in the bush out at Warren, decided that wasn't for me, returned to Sydney and after doing a few labouring jobs around the place ended up working for the Builders Labourers Federation - the Norm Gallagher incarnation of it. I gravitated towards the information side of the BLF and edited the branch tabloid newspaper, called The BL. I did that for a few years while, at the same time, organising the rest of the information flow for the New South Wales branch of the union. When the BLF was deregistered, it was interesting that exhibits 1 to 8 in the case against us were the first eight issues of the newspaper that I'd edited.
While I was doing the union job, I was dealing with typesetters all the time. A couple of friends of mine wanted to set up a phototypesetting business, so I went silent partners with them in a business called Kelly's Graphics. When the BLF was obviously going to be deregistered, I started to spend more time in the business. I taught myself to typeset. I always had an interest in words and a lot of the work we were doing required writing and what we'd now call copyediting. So I taught myself with the available references and used that to add a bit of value to our work.
I sold my interest in Kelly's Graphics when I got married in 1986, and worked around the industry, getting a handle on the new desktop publishing applications at the same time. I was approached by people connected with the Packer organisation. They were looking for somebody who understood typesetting, who understood desktop publishing, and who could teach. As far as they could tell, I was the only person with those qualifications. So they hired me to train their magazine subeditors and artists as they moved to desktop publishing systems. I went to work for them for six months and stayed for 11 years, by which time I was burnt out, so I went bush for 18 months on a couple of hundred acres I owned near Goulburn - planted gardens, raised chooks, that sort of stuff. When I emerged in 2000, I decided to move to Canberra. I looked around for work and thought, 'I may as well bite the bullet and edit for a living.'
So I approached a couple of agencies, for whom I still work, and that's what I do. I'm quite happy doing it. It's been an interesting route to get here, but I like the work.
What was it like working on Tharunka?
James: My very first year at UNSW was the year when Wendy Bacon and her coeditors challenged the obscenity laws in New South Wales by publishing pornography in Tharunka. I wasn't involved with the magazine at that stage, but it was an interesting phenomenon. They ended up successfully changing the laws - and for a while you could sell any copy of Tharunka, which was free, in the local pubs for about five bucks. The student papers were a major tool for organisation around anti-Vietnam war activity and anti-conscription activity, and I was involved in that as well.
Do you have any views on how technology is impacting on the work of editors?
James: Technology has certainly widened the necessary skill-set for an editor who wants to work across the industry. You're expected to be familiar with all the formats that information can arrive in. Nobody can work with just pen and paper any more.
Have you any views on what it is we do here: the nature of the work and how we can make our service provision more efficient?
James: Perhaps it's the ex-agitator in me, but I think professional editors should make a greater effort to impose quality on the material they deal with. It's up to editors to campaign a bit for quality in printed English. We can't always achieve it but we should make a point of trying.
I'd like to see the society try again with an annual editing prize. Obviously, we wouldn't do it next time around on the basis of annual reports, but I think that has potential to raise the profile, probably in conjunction with the accreditation process once it's well under way.
What do you like to do when you're not sitting in front of a computer?
James: That's very seldom nowadays. I read. I read compulsively - mostly science. I used to read a lot of history but I found it fairly tedious after the rise of critical theory. But a bit of interesting stuff's starting to appear, so I'm picking that up again now. I went through a historical hiatus, if you like, during which I read very little except science, aided by the fact that I was doing reviews for The Canberra Times science pages, which meant that I was getting free science books. I have shelves and shelves of them.
I believe that you like to go to the pub every so often and …
James: Oh, I have been known to bend an elbow, to do a pub quiz.
Anything else that you would like to say?
James: Editors rule, okay.
Louise Forster and James Dixon
Time is an odd commodity. It can be saved or wasted, but it can't be created. When you 'make time' for something, you do so at the expense of something else. You can live on borrowed time, but you hope you'll never have to repay the loan. You should never say, 'I'm just killing time', because the one sure thing in life is that time is already killing you! The management of time is a preoccupation for most of us, dictated by the calendar and the clock. And, thinking about the calendar, I began by wondering why September is so called (Latin septem = seven), when it is actually the ninth month. In the same way, the names of the months that follow are obviously all 'wrong' as well.
The reason, I discovered, is that when Rome was founded (in or around 738 BC), the Romans adopted the Greek lunar calendar. But they only counted 10 months in the year, March to December, with 304 days in all, leaving a gap of 611/4 winter days. Around 700 BC their ruler, Numa Pompilius, filled this gap by adding a new January at the beginning and a new February at the end to make 12 lunar months - except that September was now the eighth month. Some 250 years later, in 452 BC, February was promoted from number 12 to number 2, between January and March. The year then looked a bit more like it does today, but the old names of the four last months remained, so that September was now ninth in line. The year still had only 355 days, so a whole extra month had to be popped in about every four years to keep in step with the seasons.
Our calendar has gone through a couple of major changes since then. The word itself comes from the Latin calendarium, an account book with dates based on the calends, the first days of the lunar months. On 1 January 45 BC, Julius Caesar replaced the multitude of calendars then in use across the Roman Empire with a single new one. His Julian calendar was based on the apparent movements of the sun, not the moon - a solar, rather than a lunar, calendar - with a year of 3651/4 days, divided into 12 months of 30 or 31 days and one of 28, increased to 29 every four years. The introduction must have been traumatic - in the previous year, 46 BC, so many days had to be intercalated in preparation for the new system, to bring the dates into line with the seasons, that the year totalled 445 days! It was another 40 years before the emperor Augustus finally ironed out the problems and brought the Julian calendar on track.
Caesar's adviser in all this was the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, but unfortunately he was 11 minutes and 14 seconds out in calculating the length of a year. Not much, but near enough wasn't quite good enough, and by the middle of the 16th century the dates were a couple of weeks out of step with the seasons. In 1582, after leisurely debates that began in 1545, Pope Gregory XIII issued a Papal Bull revising the calendar so that the Spring equinox fell correctly on 21 March. To achieve this, the day after 4 October 1582 was called the 15th. The only other change corrected Sosigenes' error by decreeing that century years would be considered leap years only if they could be divided by 400, like the years 1600 and 2000. From then on the Gregorian calendar was astronomically sound, reconciling the solar year with the lunar months, and making it easier to fix the dates of Easter and other church feasts. But the difference between Roman and Orthodox Catholicism delayed its universal adoption by centuries, and some Protestants even saw it as the work of the Antichrist. Britain made the change only in 1752, the Balkan countries and Russia between 1912 and 1918, and Greece in 1923.
The Julian calendar had given us 12 months with recognisable names, but what do they all mean? Janus was the god of doorways and beginnings, usually shown with two faces looking different ways and therefore a very efficient guardian of the new year. Februa was a festival of purification, held on 15 February. March was named for Mars, the god of war. The Roman month Aprilis was dedicated to Venus - the name may be linked either to Juno's other name, Aphrodite, or to aperire, to open, with reference to the opening of buds and blossoms in the European spring. May and June were named for the goddesses Maia and Juno. The Senate renamed Quintilis 'July' in 44 BC in honour of Julius Caesar (and stabbed him on 15 March of the same year). Sextilis became 'August' in 8 BC in recognition of the emperor Augustus, who succeeded in making the Julian calendar work. And so to the four last months, which in the early Roman republican calendar had been numbered septem, octo, novem and decem - seven, eight, nine and ten respectively - but now moved along two places.
What about the week? A week is a completely arbitrary division of the calendar. It is there for our convenience and has no astronomical significance. The Romans initially had 8 days in their week, but when Christianity became the official religion in the 4th century they adopted the 7-day week, The days were named after the known planets: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. English still uses Sunday, Monday and Saturday, but Mars' day became Tiw's day, Tiw being the old Teutonic god of war, whom the Romans equated with Mars. Similarly for the remaining days with Teutonised names: Woden's day, Thor's day and Frigg's day.
The French say dimanche for Sunday, a contraction of dies dominicus, 'the Lord's day', which also gives the Italian domenica. Most of the other day names in the Romance languages fit pretty closely to the Latin - continuing with the French and Italian examples, lundi/lunedi, mardi/martedi, mercredi/mercoledi, jeudi/giovedi (remember, Jupiter was also called Jove), vendredi/venerdi. But Saturday is different again: samedi/sabato show links to the Jewish Sabbath, the day of rest prescribed under the Mosaic law (sambati dies in Latin), which unlike the Christian rest day doesn't fall on Sunday. German is mostly like the English, with Sonntag, Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch ('mid-week'), Donnerstag (Thor was the thunder god) and Freitag. 'Sunday eve', Sonnabend, makes good logical sense for Saturday, but another word for Saturday in south Germany, Austria and Switzerland is Samstag, harking back again to the Sabbath.
We've looked at a few timely words, based mainly around the calendar. But do we really manage time, or does it manage us? After Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4-minute mile in 1954 he went on a speaking tour of schools. At one junior school a small boy was frantic to ask him, 'Sir, Sir, oh Sir… what did you do with the time you saved?' A question we might all want to ask ourselves - some of the time.
Peter Judge
Sources: Most of the calendar information comes from the Encyclopaedia Britannica 2005 Ultimate Reference Suite on DVD. Etymologies are based on the OED, Ernest Weekley's An Etymological Dictionary of modern English (Dover 1967, first pub. 1921) and Hachette Le dictionnaire du Français (1992). The image of Janus is from a Roman coin in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
The Accreditation Board of the Institute of Professional Editors (IPE) met on 21 and 22 May. It was a fruitful meeting, with our discussion ranging across a very broad range of issues. It was apparent that there are many issues at stake, including a few 'challenges'.
The draft minutes of the two-day meeting are available for anyone who may wish to look at them (email address below), but the main issues, summarised here, will give you a taste for what we covered.
We agreed that the Accreditation Board, which is the body responsible for managing accreditation on behalf of the Institute of Professional Editors (formerly CASE), will comprise a representative from each state and the ACT (representation for the Northern Territory is still to be decided), a delegate from the Institute of Professional Editors and a representative of the accreditation assessors. Ed Highley had already been selected by the Institute as its delegate.
For the first Accreditation Board three delegates (from Victoria, the ACT and Tasmania) will serve for two years, while the remaining delegates will serve for three years. I'm happy to talk to anyone about the detailed reasons for this, but essentially it relates to maintaining a mix of new and experienced delegates. Robin Bennett, Queensland's representative, was elected Chair of the Board.
We agreed that there would be a single level of achievement for accreditation and that each society would be invited to identify 'distinguished' editors to join the initial pool of assessors.
We discussed, but did not resolve, a number of other issues, including those related to the establishment of a secretariat for the Accreditation Board; insurance and indemnity issues; and funding.
What should you do to prepare for accreditation?
• carefully read again the final report of the Accreditation Working Group (available at <www.case-editors.org>)
• start gathering material that you may wish to present as part of your application for accreditation
• review forthcoming issues of the newsletter for information on what will be required for accreditation
• attend the October IPA conference in Melbourne to participate in the 'accreditation' workshop, where five mock applications for accreditation will be assessed.
Louise Forster, Accreditation Board delegate
<louise@wordsworth.com.au>
is published by Canberra Society of Editors,
PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603.
© Canberra Society of Editors 2005. ISSN 1039-3358
The next newsletter will appear in in August and the copy deadline for this issue is 29 July.
The editor welcomes contributions using Word for Windows, by email to peter.judge@alianet.alia.org.au
If by snail mail, then send them on a floppy disk or CD-ROM to Peter Judge at 10 Glyde Place, Kambah ACT 2902. If mailing, always provide a printout as well.
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