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.
28 June: Editors' Grand Quiz Night.
26 July: The AGM and dinner.
- Next meeting: Follow that scent!
- From the President
- Floating in Foyers
- Thinking about words: the glamour of grammar
- My grab bag … seven deadly sins
- Track changers with Fleur Goding
- Ed•Ex 2006 - the draft program
- Copyright and deadlines
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fleur, what brought you to editing?
I guess a love of books and words - you know, classic set up. My first job in publishing was in the mailroom at Oxford University Press and my first break came after about a month when the managing editor gave me the editorial assistant role. So, it was a very quick acceleration into the world of editing. I had that very precious time of being mentored and taught in-house by a fantastic managing editor.
I then moved on to Lonely Planet and did travel books for a while, which was fun. From there I moved to Pearson Education, another educational publisher. Three years ago I started my own business and moved more into communications consulting, with editing being one of the services I offered to clients. Through all that I studied for a postgraduate qualification in editing and publishing and then a masters degree in virtual communications from RMIT. I then went on to teach editing there.
So, yes, it's kind of a full circle. It's been good fun, and now I'm here in Canberra working with Loma Snooks at the Australian Government Solicitor.
Tell us a bit more about working at the three publishers: Oxford University Press, Lonely Planet and Pearson Education.
Oxford was very traditional in terms of its approach to editing. It valued its editorial department highly and gave it a lot of resources. It had many publishers there and not a huge list at the time, so it did put a lot of resources and effort into production. Again, my experience at Oxford was that we did great books with a great reputation in a very solid market, albeit a small one for Australia.
Oxford was really the inspiration for staying in publishing and pursuing editing as a career.
You talked about being mentored. What did that involve?
My mentor was highly experienced and was very hands-on and, I guess in a way, mothering of all her staff. She spent a lot of time sitting with me, teaching me how to proofread and then, after a few months of that she'd start me off with small editing jobs. She would supervise all this very closely.
Would you have worked in hard copy and electronic?
Yes, I did both at that time because their processes were on the verge of changing. So there was still a lot of the old process, the hard copy edits, going on, which was a really good way to learn. That's the way that I taught editing as well. I'm really glad that hard copy was the basis for my training.
What about Lonely Planet?
I worked there after I became a qualified editor and had some experience under my belt. A lot of the work was sourcing content from authors all over the world, compiling that; and doing a very quick edit.
The work is particularly time sensitive because they do so many updated editions for popular destinations. Now they've got the print-on-demand service which means that customers can go online, choose chapters from various books, pull them together and have them printed individually.
Pearson Education?
A bit different. My title there was Project Editor, so it was more of a project management role. I oversaw all of the production, design and editorial processes, which included outsourcing most of the editing. I was working mainly on primary and secondary school books there, including picture books. It was fantastic. There are a lot of precious authors of children's books, I've discovered, so that was a good challenge as well.
What was the subject of your masters degree?
It was in virtual communication, which sounds a bit ethereal. But it really focused on a new interest for me: online communications, including web development, and corporate communications. Screen-based technology provides fresh, exciting ways for businesses to communicate with their audiences.
Your own business was in that area of corporate communications as well as some traditional editing?
It was a mix of traditional book editing services and driving new business towards web development and information design, for which I built a team of programmers to execute the technical side. My web development services included building site architecture, navigation, best-practice usability - things which I think editors are good at, but might not know it in the online context. It's the same principles applied to a different medium; one that is much more fluid and alive than print.
You bring many of the same skills and the principles of communication to the online medium?
Absolutely. Structural editing, for instance, is the perfect example.
I'm working on the Australian Government Solicitor's intranet at the moment. I was attracted to AGS for the opportunity to contribute to this as part of a broader corporate communications program.
I couldn't just stick with print now. There's far too much going on with the online medium.
You moved to Canberra recently?
Yes, about three months ago. I find everyone really friendly. I don't know whether it's me and what I project but, yes, it's amazing. I walked into a supermarket on my first day here. I sneezed and three people simultaneously said, 'Bless you' - it just blew me away.
Any special interests?
Yoga's a big one. Writing short stories and poetry. I've just bought a bicycle to see Canberra on two wheels.
Tell us about the RMIT course
The editing/publishing course is a graduate diploma. If you do an extra semester on top of that you get your masters of editing and publishing. That's been a recent development. That wasn't offered about five years ago.
It's a great course. RMIT has built its reputation on being able to place people into roles three steps ahead of graduates from other universities.
I remember Helen Topor at the Society's March meeting saying 'Look, we'll just do a quick exercise. Everyone stand up. Those who have a formal qualification in editing sit down'. I think it was me and one other person who sat down. It was really interesting to see that response. It's a snapshot in time that won't be repeated. Having a tertiary qualification is a prerequisite now. This is fine as long as the courses maintain their quality.
Do you think that someone who has a tertiary qualification such as yours should receive accreditation automatically?
No, absolutely not. I think experience counts for a lot as well.
Fleur, thank you for talking to me for the newsletter.
Fleur Goding and Louise Forster
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
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 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.
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