Canberra Society of Editors Newsletter
Vol 15 • Number 4 • May 2006
Next meeting Wednesday 31 May
Follow that scent …
Michael Hardy, TACTICS Consulting Pty Ltd
What do your readers have in common with wild animals? Join
us at 6.00 for 6.30 pm in the Friends Lounge of the National Library and find
out in this talk by Michael Hardy. Along the way you'll discover 'information
scent' and how to use it to make it easier for your readers to find the
information they need.
In this talk Michael will cover a number of aspects of
presenting information online, including the latest techniques for information
analysis, design and presentation.
Michael is the ACT Branch Manager for TACTICS Consulting
Pty Ltd, an independent Australian consulting company, and the sole Australian
provider of leading information life-cycle solution Information Mapping®, a
practical and research-based approach that enables organisations to create
effective, usable and logical documentation, reference material and business
communications - including email and web content.
Don't forget, you can also join us for dinner at a nearby
inexpensive eatery after the meeting.
And coming shortly:
28 June: Editors' Grand Quiz Night.
26 July: The AGM and dinner.
Contents
Next meeting: Follow that scent!
Thinking about words: the glamour of grammar
My grab bag … seven deadly sins
Ed•Ex 2006 - the draft program
From the President
We're in a profession where having good relationships is
perhaps the single most important aspect of our work. Knowledge, a passion for
language, craft skills, meticulous attention to sometimes tedious detail and
much more - all these are necessary. But if we fail to form a bond of mutual
trust and respect with our clients and colleagues we cannot do our job
effectively.
So, to Ed•Ex 2006, which has 'relationships' as its theme
this year. Elsewhere in this newsletter you'll find the program and I think
you'll agree that the Ed•Ex committee, with Kerie Newell as its driving force,
has put together a particularly varied and interesting program. Already there
is strong interest from the government and corporate sectors, so don't delay -
register now, if you haven't already (details are on our website).
Those of you who are closely following progress towards the
final stage of formation of a national organisation of editors will have a chance
to meet Janet Mackenzie, IPEd's liaison officer, at Ed•Ex. Janet writes the
regular column that keeps us all up to date on IPEd activities. Because of the
timing of the interim council's latest teleconference, Janet has no column this
month.
I should, however, report that most societies have now
formally agreed to provide seed funding to IPEd and that our society will be
setting up a discrete account to handle these funds and other institute moneys
until incorporation. This is, of course, yet another additional burden for our
treasurer (thank you, Sue), but a temporary one, we hope.
Another great step forward was the acceptance by all
delegates of a code of practice to be incorporated into the institute's
structure and operations statement on the IPEd website <www.iped-editors.org/>. This
resulted from exchanges of emails between IPEd delegates in recent months in
response to an article published in the February issue of Blue Pencil, the newsletter of the NSW society (see my column in our February
newsletter).
Earlier in the year our committee began updating a document
that sets out the roles and responsibilities of committee members. We're almost
there and hope to finalise it at the May meeting. (Why on earth does it take so
long for editors to agree on the final wording of a document? Just something to
ponder.)
At the April committee meeting, someone noted that one of
the positions has never been filled - freelance register editor - leading to a
discussion about whether we should continue to have a print version of the
register at all. The print version loses currency even before it's printed and
there's no way around that, as we are, thankfully, continuing to receive a
steady flow of applications for full membership. We would welcome your views.
Virginia Wilton,
President
Behind the
scenes behind the scenes -
creating Floating in Foyers
Our three May speakers
Floating in Foyers is a
recently-released biography of Coralie Wood, Canberra publicist, entertainer
and raconteur. At our April meeting we were entertained not only by getting
some insights into the creative process of writing and editing, but also by the
lady herself, who has a wealth of stories to tell about her life and about the
hundreds of stars she has looked after.
It was a fascinating insight into the collaboration between
the three people involved - the subject, the author (Marya Glyn-Daniel) and the
editor (Susan Hampton), the role each of them played, and the interactions
between them in creating and polishing the work.
Marya described the process of writing the book from its
genesis - a seemingly casual remark from Coralie that 'People have told me that
I should write my life story down. I give talks at dinners, tell stories from
my life, and jokes. People say I should write it down' - through to its highly
theatrical launch at Canberra's Teatro Vivaldi theatre restaurant.
She described some of the advice Susan gave, such as
writing in scenes, pretending she was writing a movie and always thinking of
the visuals. Each scene, she said, should say something, whether in words, imagery,
body language or in dialogue to advance the plot and our understanding of our
character. Marya had written a couple of one-act plays so this wasn't as
foreign or terrifying territory for her as it might have been for some other
writers.
The importance of transition was another thing Susan
impressed on her - for example placing Coralie and herself somewhere, as a
background to story-telling, such as driving beside the Tamar River in
Launceston on a promotional tour for the Great Moscow Circus. Marya said this
may not seem like a simple device but it freed her up a lot and allowed her to
move the story about in time. She had written the current events in diary style
with dates; however both Coralie and Marya had decided fairly early on that
they wanted the book to be more than just a chronological record of events in
Coralie's life.
So when Marya began shuffling about with time she took the
dates off, which liber-ated her even further. She described mentally and
physically laying out her material like a pack of cards and playing solitaire
with it.
Coralie revealed that the process was an eye-opener for her
- she said that before meeting Susan, she had no idea what an editor was, or a
publisher or all these people you need when you're writing a book: 'I thought
you just wrote it and that was it!' So she was intrigued when Susan insisted
the book needed to bring out her 'dark side' more. This led to the revelation
that her ancestors were Russian Jews who were kicked out of Russia, which led
to intensive research on her family history, which ended up being woven into
the story and added a whole new dimension to what made Coralie into the sort of
person she is.
Marya also said that as a result of the collaboration, she
took a new approach to openings - both of the book and of each chapter. Susan
encouraged her to find the chapter that particularly gives us the essence of
Coralie. No matter where it had occurred in the sequence of events, this would
be the opening chapter. She chose The Night of the Canberra Area Theatre
Awards which she thought was lively and fun and
really summed Coralie up.
And a chapter which might have originally started with
something like 'She invited me to go to Bega with her' ended up:
'Now!', her usual phone greeting. Occasionally she gave me a clue - 'it's me!' - but in general she went straight into business. 'How are you fixed for Thursday? Thursday and Friday this week?'
Possibly the biggest challenge Marya had was the treatment
of the Star Stories - the thirty or so backstage stories about some of the
stars Coralie has ferried around over the years. Her first plan was to have one
story in italics at the start and end of each chapter.
These ended up being placed almost casually in the text
where they could be triggered off by a casual remark or a memory triggered by a
familiar place. For example, at the War Memorial with playwright Alan Hopgood
for a media call for his play Weary, she had
Coralie say:
Look at that gun turret, Spike insisted on climbing in there for his call, then he jumped out again and said, 'I can't be funny in here' - well we could have told him that - and so on with the rest of the story.
And to top it off, Coralie took the floor and entertained
us with an anecdote about looking after Shirley MacLaine during her visit to
Canberra. But if you want to know what that had to do with the Show Pony,
boiled eggs, bird and fish noises, and glass cutters, you'll have to buy the
book to find out.
Ted Briggs
Floating in Foyers: Coralie Wood Lashes Out, published by Ginninderra Press. ISBN 174027 359 1. Price $30.00
plus pp, available from <cfw@ozemail.com.au>.
Photos by courtesy of Coralie Wood Promotions.
Thinking about Words: the glamour of grammar
There was a wife lived all alone
And she had babies three
And she sent them away to the North Countrie
To learn their gramarye.
...................(Old Scottish ballad)
What! Grammar glamorous? You may well wonder at the
connection, but let me admit from the outset that the connection is mainly
linguistic. It just so happens that both words have a common origin in the
Greek word for word, gramma. In the Middle Ages it was supposed that anybody
with enough intellectual pretensions to worry about grammar would inevitably be
dabbling in magic and spells, with perhaps a little alchemy on the side.
The idea of grammar floated back and forth between England
and France, and at various times was called gramarye, meaning both grammar and occult learning, gramaire and gramoire, from which we get grimoire, a book of spells. Look up grimoire
on the Web - you will find that witchcraft is alive and well and very up to date.
Or as glomery, which the Scots seem to have
turned quite early on into glamour (for
witchcraft). You would 'cast a glamour' over somebody to bewitch them. And in
our day too, glamour indeed implies a magical charm, even if that charm may
sometimes prove illusory.
This was brought to mind during Andreas Scholl's wonderful
concert a few weeks ago. Among other folksongs, he included the ballad about
the witch of the Well of Usher who sent her sons off to learn their mysterious
trade, their gramarye, but on the way they died.
In due course she conjured them home for a very brief visit, but at cockcrow
they had to go back to where they came from. All very tuneful and agreeably
spooky.
Grammar books date back to the 5th century BC in India, but
in the Western tradition they began with the ancient Greeks, who found them a
necessary tool both for the study of their literature and to maintain the
purity of their language. A Greek scholar named Dionysius Thrax, working in the
museum of Alexandria in Egypt around 120 BC, wrote a book called The Art of
Grammar (or The Art of Letters), in which he analysed literary texts in terms of letters,
syllables and eight parts of speech.
All pretty basic, you might think, but it was not until the
2nd century AD, more than 200 years later, that another scholar, Apollonius
Discolus, took the next step and produced a treatment of syntax. The Romans
largely adopted the Greek system and applied it to Latin, which had a similar
structure. The Greeks thought the language of Homer was the ideal model; the
Romans prized the style found in the works of Cicero and Virgil. So once again
the emphasis was on the literary applications rather than purely linguistic
analyses.
English grammar books first appeared in the 11th century,
the first being a Latin grammar written in Anglo-Saxon. This set an unhappy
precedent, it seems, because from that time through to the last century the
English language was more or less dogged by the inflexible structures of Latin
grammar. Fortunately in recent more enlightened times greater freedom - some
might say too much - has been given to writers. We no longer have a total ban
on split infinitives, the owls in Boston no longer say To whit to whom, and it seems OK to use a preposition to end a sentence with. No
one corrects me if I write I will instead of I
shall.
Italics are no longer used for foreign words and phrases if
they are considered to have been absorbed into English - a difficult matter to
be dogmatic about. Macquarie assumes that if they are found in an English
dictionary at all, that's good enough, and so italicises nothing. The language
evolves and changes, and so do our perceptions of what is acceptable style
grammatically.
As we noted earlier, in the beginning of grammar was the word (Greek gramma) - the written word.
Is grammar also involved in speech? Yes, every unimpaired person picks up 'a
native speaker's grammar' from infancy by listening to others talking, and this
is usually well-established by the age of six. It is what enables us to
communicate: it gives enough of a common structure to the language we all use,
even though that structure may be different in detail from one person to
another, as is also the vocabulary we use.
Modern grammarians are divided into two camps: the
'descriptivists' and the 'transformationalists'. The former study samples of
speech to be able to describe the language and
how it works and changes. The latter delve into its structure, to try to understand what it is that a native speaker of a language
knows unconsciously, so that they can put a sentence together and communicate.
When Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme was
surprised to find that he had been 'talking prose these past forty years', he
was also relying unconsciously on his acquired grammar for it to make sense.
Today, school students learn grammar (if they learn it at
all) without reference to current scholarly thinking, as a set of rules that
must be followed to speak or write correctly. Not very glamorous, perhaps, but
necessary in our present-day society if we are to be recognised as educated.
However, the influences of web writing and SMS messaging continue to make
curious and rapid inroads into our literary consciousness, and you may wonder what
will happen to our language another generation down the track...
Peter Judge
Sources: Mainly the Encyclopaedia Britannica on DVD, but also Frank Palmer's Grammar (Penguin Books 1971) and numerous websites found by googling for
'The Well of Usher', which has a variety of different versions, some
(surprisingly) strongly religious.
My grab bag . . . seven deadly sins
There are more than seven, of course, but these are some
that I consider to be pretty deadly and worth avoiding if you want to be
regarded as a competent editor. Try making your own list.
Writing a slapdash EOI or quote
If you're asked for an expression of interest (EOI), you
give just that, no more: your interest in the job, your qualifications to do
it, an understanding of what's required, and not much more. You can't provide
precise hourly rates until you see a sample of the manuscript. The tone needs
to be friendly without giving too much away - don't commit yourself until you
write the quote.
The EOI is an important piece of writing - it's the
client's first impression of you. I saw a four-line EOI recently that was
rejected because the editor concerned had not checked for spelling and grammar
errors, had quoted an hourly rate before reading any of the manuscript, had
used a peremptory tone and didn't refer specifically to the job. No client will
employ an editor who writes in a slapdash style and doesn't proofread their own
emails!
Plenty has been written about quoting for editing jobs. I
won't say more here except to advise being clear about the time required (after
checking a sample), what you need to charge for the level of edit required and
to cover expenses, your planned approach to the job and what the client can
expect and when. This is a definitive document: the EOI is indicative. There's
much more to writing quotes - please refer to my article on quoting, 'By the
way…' in The Canberra Editor, January 2002.
Not owning and using standard reference books
An editor needs to have at least the following immediately
available:
• a good, up-to-date dictionary - in Australia, generally The
Macquarie Dictionary (latest edition) - it gives
Australian-preferred spellings first; in-house editors may need other
dictionaries as dictated by house style
• Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers (latest edition); editors of academic material may also need the Chicago
Manual of Style or the Publication Manual of the
American Psychological Association for material to
be published in the United States
• a thesaurus such as Roget's Thesaurus of English Words
and Phrases
• a good grammar book - nobody can 'know it all' and
everyone can be confused by 'creative' grammar in a manuscript.
In addition, my bookshelves contain classics by authors
including Strunk and White, Gowers, Fowler etc, editing handbooks by Butcher,
Flann and Hill, Mackenzie and others, grammar and style books. I don't suggest
that the beginning editor should go on a shopping spree, but do own the
essentials and do refer to them while editing. The best editors are meticulous
about grammar and keep up to date with stylistic and idiomatic changes.
Losing your copy of the Standards
You aren't meant to commit the Australian Standards for
Editing Practice to memory, but have a copy handy.
Print it out from the Canberra Society of Editors website <www.editorscanberra.org>. You do
need to know what your role as an editor is and what a client expects of an
editor. It's all set out in the Standards. Print
out the Commissioning Checklist at the same
time.
Thinking you can compete in a highly technological world with antique technology
Computers date very quickly. If your editing is all manual,
you won't have this problem, but online editors need to be able to offer quick
turnaround, editing with Track Changes, formatting that is acceptable to
printers and so on. If you need to get broadband to cope with large downloads,
do it. There are no prizes for second best - only the best will do in editing.
Build the costs into your quotes over a period.
Resting on your laurels
Editing, like anything to do with language, moves on.
Qualifications acquired years ago are probably not sufficient any more - get up
to date with post-graduate courses and with training provided by the Societies
of Editors. Read The Canberra Editor, and read other journals, manuals and handbooks on editing and
style. Learn what's available on your computer and use it. Grab any opportunity
to network with other editors. This is where you learn more about editing than
almost anywhere else, and all societies welcome visitors from other societies
to their meetings, training sessions, conferences, and other gatherings. Learn
something about our allied professions - indexing, technical writing, graphic
design, publishing. In Canberra we often have joint events, and these are
wonderful opportunities for updating knowledge of the whole publishing
industry.
Not being meticulous and crystal clear in your editing work
The client has every right to expect pernickety editing -
that's what you're supposed to be good at. Manual mark-ups should follow
standard proof correction guidelines and symbols; electronic mark-ups (whether
or not using Track Changes) should include comment notes where explanation is
necessary. I was once asked to re-edit someone else's broad-brush edit, which
was not what the client had asked for nor had any right to expect from a
competent editor. Embarrassing.
And the seventh deadly sin? Sloth!
Sitting back and doing nothing. With accreditation around
the corner, we all need to lift our game. The Standards are being revised to
bring them up to date, and then the accreditation process can begin. But
there's no point in any of the hard work being put into all this progress
towards greater professionalism and recognition for our profession if we don't
take advantage of it and indulge in some self-improvement. For some, this may
mean first looking at what we're typing in an Expression of Interest and making
sure that our 'first impression' is our best effort.
© Elizabeth Manning
Murphy, 2006
Ed.Ex 2006
Old
Parliament House, Canberra
Saturday 17 June, 9.00 am to 6.00 pm
The draft program was included in the printed newsletter.
It is not reproduced here because the program had developed further even before
the newsletter was distributed. If still current, find it through the web
notice board at
www.editorscanberra.org/notices.htm
The Canberra Editor
is published by Canberra Society of Editors,
PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603.
© Canberra Society of Editors 2005. ISSN 1039-3358
Newsletter schedule
The next newsletter will appear in June 2006 and the copy deadline for this issue is 2 June.
The editor welcomes contributions by email to <peter.judge@alianet.alia.org.au>, using Word for Windows, for PC or Mac.
If by snail mail, then please send it on a floppy disk with accompanying hard copy to Peter Judge at:
10 Glyde Place, Kambah ACT 2902.
This web version of the newsletter
prepared by Peter Judge,
18/5/06