The society's end-of-year gourmet barbecue will feature award-winning and gluten-free sausages, tasty vegetarian patties, and an array of interesting salads. The barbecue will start at 6 pm, with the usual drinks and wonderful nibbles, and will end with ice cream (not just for the kids!), cake, coffee and tea at about 8 pm. The society will, as usual, provide wine, juice and mineral water.
The barbecue area is at the east side of Telopea Park at the lake end of Currie Crescent in Kingston (the same spot as last year). It is away from water and has nearby play equipment, parking and toilets. Bring your own chair or rug.
To cover costs, the society's treasurer will collect, on the day, $12 per adult, $6 per child aged 10 years or over, and $3 per child under 10. If you would like to attend, please contact Ann Parkinson on or before Friday, 22 November, so that quantities can be worked out. Her email address is ann.parkinson@atrax.net.au, fax number is 6282 1081, and phone number is 6282 1993.
So come along to Telopea Park at 6 pm on Wednesday, 27 November. In the unlikely event of poor weather, ring Ann on her mobile 0411 091 072 (only on the day) for information on whether an alternative venue has been organised. Hope to see you there.
The next meeting
Data migration and websites
The President's column
National editors conference 2003 - call for papers
XML - a brief introduction
One thing and another
New member
News and notes
APA workshops
Dates for your diary
Deadlines for contributions
The speaker at the society's October meeting, Susan Hampton - who is currently the web editor at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) - delighted us with her anecdotes as she recounted her recent experiences at the commission. The ACCC is in the process of building new websites for the Intranet and Internet. Susan was hired as a contractor for seventeen weeks to migrate data (move information) from the old websites to the new. However, the work turned out to be a lot more complicated than this may sound. For one thing, the new websites have been designed completely differently from the existing ones; therefore the categories where the information must be moved to are now different, and in fact these categories are still being established.
On the existing Internet site, for example, the information is organised along the lines of the internal structures of the ACCC as an organisation and a bureaucracy. The new site is organised from the point of view of the user, who may want to ask a question or make a complaint or get more information on some part of the Trade Practices Act. The information spaces therefore have different names, according to the language the user really employs; there is a Plain-English feel to the site.
The first eight weeks of Susan's job involved not so much editing but dealing with how the information is organised (the information architecture); and understanding, refining and explaining it to staff who will be using the new sites.
Susan is a literary editor and has taught literature in universities. Although she has been building her own website for writers and editors (still in progress), the size and complex nature of the ACCC site means that anyone from the outside would be thrown in at the deep end. Fortunately, Susan is not easily daunted, but her first few days at the ACCC were full of mysterious questions and comments, for example, 'Is that grabbable?', 'Where are the fragments of the topic hierarchies?', 'Can he explain the difference between functionality and useability?',
'Tell her to leave the mandatory fields alone' and 'It's obvious there's soft overlap here'. The job soon became much more interesting for Susan than moving information from one place to another. The audience of over thirty editors was both entertained and captivated by Susan's delightful sense of humour and her natural ability to spin a good yarn. This is the third time she has reinvented herself in the workplace in the past few years. Her current work could hardly be further from discussions of the finer points of Christina Stead's prose fictions, or the subplot of Gatsby. Also, it is much, MUCH better paid.
Ara Nalbandian
At our October meeting, Susan Hampton informed and entertained us with details of her new life in 'data migration', information architecture and interpersonal relations at the ACCC. Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned you had to be there to get the story.
Has anyone else noticed how dilemmas appear to be multiplying in recent times? There is always someone or some agency in a dilemma about this or that thing. More often than not, they're not dilemmas at all as far as I can detect, just problems or even quandaries, because 'dilemma' in its primary sense is a word with a precise meaning, or at least it used to have.
To be in a dilemma is to have a quite special sort of problem, that of being forced to make a choice between two (or more) equally unattractive alternatives (or options). In logic, it is 'a form of argument in which two or more alternatives (the horns of a dilemma) are presented, each of which is indicated to have consequences Ö for the one who must choose' (Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn). Got the picture? Here's an example. Imagine you've been invited to a Bedouin leader's tent for dinner. You can't refuse. The entree is presented: sheep's eyes. You have a strong aversion to the consumption of sheep's eyes, but you know that if you don't eat them, and make complimentary rather than gagging noises while doing so, your host is going to be very upset, maybe even angry. That's a dilemma, perhaps even two of them.
Having said all that, I see that the Macquarie, while it gives no synonyms for dilemma, admits dilemma to its entry for 'quandary'. Descriptivism rules. OK!
A very practical word whose use appears to be fading is 'several'. These days people invariably write or talk about 'a number of' things, and thereby quite often fall into the trap of coupling a singular noun with a plural verb. Substitute 'several' for 'a number of' and the trap disappears, a couple of words are saved, and a sweeter sentence usually emerges.
Off the soapbox now, and on to weighty constitutional matters. On 27 October our application for incorporation was accepted by the ACT Registrar-General, so we are now the Canberra Society of Editors Incorporated. The main effect of incorporation is that the liability of the members and committee of the Society to pay for legal misdemeanours is now strictly limited.
A lesser effect is the transient warm glow experienced by those involved in drafting the new constitution needed for incorporation.
We saw democracy in action when Greg Baker used the terms of the new constitution successfully to move, at the general meeting on 30 October, for the creation of a new category of membership in the society: corporate membership. Support for the introduction of corporate membership appeared to be near unanimous among those members present. They also moved to create a new committee position to promote corporate membership and its benefits. Greg Baker was duly elected to that position. Information on what corporate membership entails will be posted on our website in due course.
We have long anticipated a financial return from our involvement in organising and running the editors-indexers joint national conference last year. It has at last appeared, the delay being due, apparently, to a need to satisfy the requirements of the tax office. Well, we all need to do that. Our share of the profit from the conference was a little over $8500 - a welcome addition to our, formerly somewhat depleted, current account.
Don't forget to sign up for the end of- year family barbecue at Telopea Park on Wednesday, 27 November (see details elsewhere in the newsletter). It replaces our usual monthly meeting. Everyone enjoyed the equivalent event last year, which is why we're doing it again - no flies on us. Look forward to seeing you there.
Ed Highley
The national editors conference will be held in Brisbane next year with the theme 'After Gutenberg and Gates - Gazing into the e-future'.The conference will focus on the changing nature and demands of the market for editors in terms of opportunities and skill requirements, including Internet, multimedia and electronic publishing. It will also focus on major issues facing the profession, in particular, accreditation and marketing the editing profession.
The conference is to take place on 18-19 July 2003, at the Bardon Centre in Brisbane. Optional workshops will be held on Sunday, 20 July. The draft conference program to date is as follows:
We have included the following workshops in our draft program for Sunday:
Ordinary sessions will be scheduled for one hour: 45 minutes of presentation followed by 15 minutes of questions.
Plenary and panel sessions will take 1.5-2 hours.
Workshops will range from two hours to full-day sessions.
David Whitbread will be presenting a conference session and conducting a workshop as well.
If you would like to present a paper on any of these topics or conduct a workshop, please contact Robin Bennett at: beyondgutenberg@hotmail.com
Please send a summary of your proposed content, approximately 250 words in length, to Robin Bennett at the address given by 28 February 2003.
Of recent years there has been a great deal of talk about XML. But what is XML and what can it be used for?
XML is short for Extensible Markup Language. XML is the cover-all phrase for technologies that permit people to store information in standard ways that they themselves define. XML technologies are not machine or operating system-dependent; they are useable whether the hardware is, for example, PC-compatible, Mac or mainframe. Information stored as XML is readily transportable between applications running under any sort of operating system or environment, whether it be, for example, Windows, Mac, Unix or Linux.
XML technologies can also be easily used to transfer and transform information. Instances of XML that editors might have come across include DocBook and the XML implementation of the Dublin Core metadata standard.
XML is ideal for anyone with an interest in maintaining information in precisely defined ways and transferring it to others with no loss of precision.
A short piece of information in XML format might look like:
<description>
<title>XML Ethics</title>
<author>Jim Long</author>
<format>Book</format>
<id>ISBN 0233576937</id>
</description>
The terms in angle brackets in the example are called tags, as they are in HTML. Unlike HTML, every opening tag must have a closing tag and every opening tag must be closed in reverse order of being opened. Thus if tag A is opened before tag B then tag B must be closed before tag A is closed. XML is called well formed when it adheres to these two rules.
To be really useful, however, XML must be written in a standard way that is more than just well formed. That standard way can vary depending on what information is being stored and the purposes to which the information is to be put. Standard ways of defining how XML will store information can take two possible forms.
One form of specification uses a Document Type Definition (DTD). A DTD, as its name suggests, is a formal way of specifying what the document must look like: it specifies precisely the structure of the XML document. DTDs are written in a special language designed for that purpose.
The other form of specification is called an XML schema. XML schemas are a more recent innovation than DTDs. Schemas provide essentially the same function as DTDs. However, XML schemas are themselves written using XML syntax. This means that the user does not have to learn two types of syntax, one for XML and one for DTDs. In addition, XML schemas can be used to provide more control over what is permitted in the XML information set. For example, an XML schema can be used to enforce the values that a particular piece of information may take.
So-called valid XML is XML that has been validated against a DTD or, alternatively, against an XML schema. This simply means that it conforms to a standard definition. XML must be valid - which also makes it well-formed - for it to be safely used to store, transform and transmit information. The recipient of any information transmitted in XML form must also possess the same DTD or XML schema against which the data was originally validated.
Another great beauty of XML, apart from standardising storage and transmission of information, is that an XML format can be used as the basis for transforming the information into other forms. The way this is done is to use transforms based on a related technology called XSLT - Extensible Style Language Transformation. These transforms can turn XML into a great many other forms, including HTML.
Note that XML most usually contains no information about format or presentation; it simply contains structured information. This is in contrast to HTML, which largely contains formatting information. There are a myriad of books on XML and, of course, a great many websites. These sites include: <http://www.w3.org/XML/>, which is the starting point for a vast amount of information about XML. Also of interest here are <http://www.docbook.org/> and <http://dublincore.org/>.
Greg Bake
Driving around eastern Australia, I've been keeping my eyes open for signs - street signs, signs pointing to places I wanted to visit, signs telling me where to buy this or that. One day recently, I came across several signs that decided me on my topic for this issue: the use of the apostrophe. In this one day I spotted the following:
The apostrophe is used to show possession or omission. It is only rarely used to indicate plural, in expressions that would otherwise be unclear - for instance, in mind your p's and q's. So the first two examples are simple plurals and should be written without apostrophes: NEW POTATOES and VALLEY VIDEOS. The first example offends doubly because the plural marker is actually -es and not just -s.
The third example shows the confusion that can occur between its meaning belonging to it, and it's meaning it is (apostrophe used to indicate omission). The correct spelling here would be IT'S MAGIC!
In the fourth example, the correct spelling is ALAN JONES'S PROGRAM, (1) and the pronunciation should reflect this with JONES'S being pronounced [djownzez]. To say Alan [djownz] program is to have listeners believe that his surname is Jone. To write it as Jones' is to show confusion about where to put the apostrophe.
My rule for using the apostrophe to indicate possession in nouns(2) is very simple. If we want to write the book belonging to John using the apostrophe,
In the case of the program of Alan Jones, use the same formula:
What about the plural of Jones? Suppose the whole Jones family, collectively known as the Joneses, own a swimming pool. Here's how to write it using the apostrophe:
Does the Joneses's swimming pool sound better? No. It sounds like [djownzezez]!! So don't add the s. It is the Joneses' swimming pool.
There is a school in Sydney that used to be known as Fort Street Boys' High School. Now it would be known as Fort Street Boys High School - no apostrophe. The word Boys has taken on the sense of an adjective rather than a possessing noun, so the apostrophe has been dropped. However, we can't drop the apostrophe in He went to the men's locker room because the plural word men doesn't end in an s.
We can probably get away with The ladies room is on the first floor. There is a school of thought that believes that the apostrophe will eventually disappear from English. Perhaps not just yet. I think it has its uses.
(1) Style Manual for authors, editors and printers, 6th edn, John Wiley & Sons Australia, 2002, pp. 85-6.
(2) Elizabeth M. Murphy, Effective Writing: Plain English at Work, Pitman, Melbourne, 1989, pp. 15-17, 56-7.
Elizabeth Murphy
1 Include Your Children when Baking Cookies
2 Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
3 Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
4 Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted
5 Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
6 Survivor of Siamese Twins Joins Parents
7 Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
8 Prostitutes Appeal to Pope
9 Panda Mating Fails;Veterinarian Takes Over
10 British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
11 Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms
12 Eye Drops Off Shelf
13 Teachers Strike Idle Kids
14 Clinton Wins on Budget, But More Lies Ahead
15 Enraged Cow Injures Farmer With Axe
16 Plane Too Close to Ground, Crash Probe Told
17 Miners Refuse to Work after Death
18 Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant
19 Stolen Painting Found by Tree
20 Two Sisters Reunited After 18 Years in Checkout Counter
21 Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years
22 Never Withhold Herpes Infection from Loved One
23 War Dims Hope for Peace
24 If Strike Isn't Settled Quickly, It May Last a While
25 Cold Wave Linked to Temperatures
26 Deer Kill 17,000
27 Enfields Couple Slain; Police Suspect Homicide
28 Red Tape Holds Up New Bridges
29 Typhoon Rips Through Cemetery; Hundreds Dead
30 Man Struck By Lightning Faces Battery Charge
31 New Study of Obesity Looks for Larger Test Group
32 Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft
33 Kids Make Nutritious Snacks
34 Chef Throws His Heart in to Helping Feed Needy
35 Arson Suspect Held in Massachusetts Fire
36 Ban On Soliciting Dead in Trotwood
37 Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half
38 New Vaccine May Contain Rabies
39 Hospitals are Sued by 7 Foot Doctors
Allison Ley, whose full membership of the society was announced in an earlier issue of the newsletter, works at The Australian National University, and has edited various publications on political and social change in the Asia-Pacific.
The most recent of these publications are Reflections on Violence in Melanesia (with Sinclair Dinnen), and The Malaysian State under Mahatir: Personalized Politics, by Inwon Hwang.
Long-time member of the society, Clive Huggan, is running some workshops on Microsoft Word early next year for his computer group, and has invited our members to attend.
The free 90-minute workshops will be from 8 to 9.30 pm on the second Tuesday of the month, from March to June inclusive, that is, four in all. The venue is not yet finalised. The sessions definitely won't be for beginners. Clive says, 'If you're a fairly basic user of Word, I wouldn't recommend that you come along - you would find the sessions cover too much ground that calls for a reasonable level of familiarity with the product. People get horribly confused and demoralised when that happens. However, if you're moderately competent with Word, you will find there will be much at the workshops to raise your productivity'.
The emphasis will be on preparing long documents efficiently, minimising time-wasting and configuring Word to suit your particular needs. Although editing methods won't be the focus of the sessions, most of the subject matter will be highly relevant to editors since Clive is a practising editor and document developer. People who went to Brett Lockwood's Styles Workshop will find one of the sessions covers similar ground. Clive has been helping Brett with his book on Word styles that will be published soon by the Victorian Society of Editors.
Other topics will include formatting documents for 'minimum maintenance'; making special toolbars; using AutoCorrect to expand typing in 'shorthand'; automating tables of contents and cross-references; indexing; minimising document corruption; mastering date hazards; and simple macros. There will also be dozens of ways to 'bend a sometimes obnoxious product to your will and make it do things that may surprise you'.
The workshops will cover Word on both Macintosh and Windows platforms: two computer display projectors are expected to be in use, allowing Word 2001 and Word 2000 to be visible at the same time to cover the small number of operating differences.
To register your interest (which is essential, as spaces are limited) send an email to <office@strategists.com.au> during the next week, specifying the version of Word that you use. Clive will send you some questions to answer and, later on, details of the venue.
Further information: Clive Huggan, 6262 5818, business hrs to 7 pm.
Presenter: Andy Palmer, Sydney: Friday, 6 December.
Cost: $395 Members (APA; Society of Editors; Galley Club;AGDA): $450
Nonmembers.
Strategies for cost-effective results. Learn from one of Australia's
leading book publicists!
Andy Palmer will draw on his 17 years experience of working in book
publishing and with authors and book publishers to help you
understand the essential elements of a publicity strategy for a
book.
For all APA workshop bookings or more information: libby.odonnell@publishers.asn.au
, Ph: 02 9281 9788
20% discount when 5 or more attend from one company!!
27 November: End-of-year BBQ,Telopea Park
28 February: Conference call for papers cut off
March - June: 1st Tuesday of the month Interim - advanced workshops on Microsoft Word run by Clive Huggan
Venue: TBA
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 February 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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