The vivacious David Whitbread will be our speaker at the Society's general meeting on Wednesday 24 September. The topic David has chosen for his talk is Deliberations on an Editors' Conference by a Graphic Designer. Which conference?, you might ask. Why, Beyond Gutenberg and Gates … gazing into the e-future, of course!
David conducted a few of the sessions at the conference in Brisbane in July this year, and we're sure that he'll present his unique perspective in his usual entertaining style. So come along and be entertained at the Friends Lounge at the National Library of Australia at 6.00 for 6.30 pm. Now that we have a catering committee again, the nibblies are bound to be a bonus.
After the talk, we'll be dining with David at a local restaurant to be announced at the meeting. Please join us for more post-talk entertainment!
Contents
Next meeting
Doing it with thy might
A short word from the President
Tidbits from Britain
Minutes of the 2003 AGM
Important! Accreditation news
Another report from the conference
Releasing books into the wild
Training - proofreading for beginners
Committee meeting, 22 August
Australian Editing Handbook
Are you financial? Was there a big RED DOT on your label?
Dates for your diary
Copyright and deadlines
The title for Dr Robert Nichol's talk came from the Book of Ecclesiastes:
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
This represented one of the themes that came through Robert's talk: that writers have a moral obligation to work hard not to trick, deceive or confuse their readers, and that editors have an important role in ensuring that they remember this obligation. He applauded those who struggle to write well, and denounced those who shirk. He did so under four heads: forgery, plagiarism, translation and writing.
Literary forgery was apparently quite an industry in the eighteenth century. Robert discussed some of the more outrageous forgeries such as the famous Ireland affair. This saga of Shakespearean forgery involved a father and son and was the last and greatest of the eighteenth century literary scandals - after James Macpherson's 'discovery' of the legendary Gaelic bard Ossian, son of Fingal; Thomas Chatterton's invention of the mediaeval poet Rowley; and William Lauder's forgery-based claim that Milton was a plagiarist. More recent successful forgeries included Hitler's diaries forged by Konrad Kujau.
Robert also discussed what motivated these forgeries. In some cases, it was money (Kujau); in others, the desire for preferment (Chatterton); some had a more sublime national agenda - Macpherson, for example, wished to create an impressive poetic tradition for Celtic society. The younger Ireland probably represents the case of a somewhat pathetic attempt by a not-very-clever son to gain respect and affection from a father not otherwise inclined to give it. Lauder's motives are unclear to this day, though he was a latter-day partisan of Charles I and it has been plausibly suggested that Lauder sought revenge against Milton for his defence of regicide by publishing a pamphlet in which he claimed that parts of Paradise Lost were plagiarised.
While there are obvious moral and legal issues with forgery, Robert had an interesting theory that these forgers succeeded because so many people wanted to believe. The human mind apparently desires to be taken in as grandly and thoroughly as possible, as suggested by the title page of J. B. Mencke's On the Charlatanry of the Learned (1721), Mundus vult decipi ('the world wants to be deceived').
Robert described one of the more notorious cases of plagiarism in which a young writer, Jacob Epstein, published his first novel Wild Oats in 1979. A year later Kingsley Amis pointed out rather dryly that, while the boundary between influence and plagiarism will always be vague, there were remarkable similarities between passages in his 1974 novel The Rachel Papers and Wild Oats.
Epstein 'borrowed' whole-heartedly from Amis and, while he made some changes to the text, he did it probably to cover up his crime rather than to improve it (as an editor would, for example). However, he didn't even do that particularly well because he didn't hide the evidence of theft. He was a shirker - he applied himself to the task but did not go far enough. With a little more effort he might have gotten away with it - but then, had he been capable of that, he probably wouldn't have needed to steal it in the first place.
Before we editors get too smug about the moral issues of plagiarism, Robert asked us to consider this: in a backhanded kind of way, plagiarism is related to editing. Editing is really the converse of plagiarism. When you plagiarise, you pretend that someone else's words are your own; but when you rewrite, you pretend that your words are someone else's. So where the plagiarist steals, the editor donates.
Robert drew interesting parallels between translation and editing. With translation, the audience lacks something: knowledge of the original language. With editing, the author often lacks something: a sufficiently clear and pleasing style that would allow the reader to understand the meaning. The translator tries to convey a sense of the meaning and pleasure to be had in the original; the editor sometimes has to supply the meaning and pleasure lacking in the original. Unlike the translator, the editor is expected to improve the original.
Using as an example a number of translations of a poem by Goethe, Robert showed how a translation can give us a faithful interpretation of the original, or even extend and improve it. Even a bad translation can show us why the original is so good.
A big difference between translation and editing is that translations - whether good or bad - do not obscure the original, whereas the process of editing actually replaces the original. So translation raises fewer moral issues than either forgery or plagiarism, but it was a little surprising to hear that bad writing raises moral issues as well.
In the famous essay 'Politics and the English Language', George Orwell made the case that bad writing is not only politically and aesthetically wrong, but it is morally wrong, and repeatedly used moral terms to describe weak habits of writing. He spoke of 'vices', 'swindles and perversions', and refers to some writers' 'dishonesty' in relying on a convenient stock of stale words and ready-made phrases.
Robert focused on one particular word that Orwell used in his essay: 'shirk'. A theme through the talk was that good writers put a lot of effort into finding the right words and expressions, whereas poor writers shirk this responsibility by simply pressing into service the first words that come to mind.
Robert returned to the theme of the title by quoting a famous demonstration by Orwell of the effects of bad writing. In Ecclesiastes, the text immediately following the word Robert chose for his title is:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Orwell suggested how this might look if a lazy writer was trying to say the same thing:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
For another famous writer in the past century, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, writing also had a moral dimension:
If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent.
Robert ended as he began, in the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson had some wise words for anyone who has ever had a book savaged by reviewers: 'An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism, and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace'.
Our forgers and plagiarists, indeed all writers, solicit fame at the hazard of disgrace: some are disgraced by their deceptions, frauds and thefts; others by their morally irresponsible prose. And because the shirker will always be with us, editors are needed: for the editor confronts all those choices that the bad writer shirked.
Ted Briggs
Author's note: parts of this report have been shamelessly plagiarised from Robert's talk!
Your hardworking committee
At the August committee meeting, we were able to welcome our new Treasurer, Louise Oliver; Jenny Cook, who has taken on the role of assistant to the Training Coordinator; and me. We rolled our sleeves up and got stuck into our highly busy agenda. We were very pleased to note that the membership renewals had continued to roll in and that all but a few of our members have elected to join us for another exhilarating year.
We are embarking on a concerted effort to sort out the many (very many!) boxes of records held by the society. Peter Judge is in charge of this project and elsewhere, at least on the website, you will see a call from him to anyone out there who thinks that they may have documents or memorabilia that should be part of the society's formal archive. At the end of this process, we should have a set of manageable and accessible records, which should also provide a reasonably complete history of the society.
Accreditationfest
Our most urgent task as a society is to consider the draft CASE proposal for accreditation. Janet Salisbury has agreed to continue her work as our representative on the CASE Accreditation Working Group. We need to provide information to Janet so that she can respond on our behalf by the November deadline; the committee members have therefore decided that we should spend the October meeting discussing the elements of the report and reaching some conclusions. The session will be set up as a workshop; it will be fun and, we hope, stimulating. So please be there. Refreshments will be available at no cost. This is an important step in the development of our professional standing and your contribution is valuable.
The draft report is on the website at <http://www.editorscanberra.org/accred.pdf> and I urge you to look at it. If you can't get to the October meeting, please let Janet or any of the committee have your comments before then so that we can incorporate your ideas and get as broad a consensus as possible. More details on the consultation arrangements will be available at the next general meeting, in the next newsletter and on our website.
Other CASE matters
Ed Highley has agreed to continue as the general CASE delegate and he is currently organising a national website for CASE - initially a portal for all the individual societies, but with scope for development. One of the items that he referred from the last CASE meeting was a request for representatives on some of the other working groups. I announced these at the August general meeting and asked for volunteers. I can't say I was bowled over in the rush, but Kerie Newell has volunteered to be the representative on the Promotions Working Group. We still need someone for the National Organisation and the Standards Review subcommittees.
Ed tells me that the commitment involved is very light - only an hour a week at the most. Think about it. This is your chance to contribute to your society at minimal inconvenience but also an opportunity to influence the development of national initiatives in your profession.
Social (?) notes
The August general meeting was well attended and the talk by Dr Robert Nichols from the Australian War Memorial was entertaining and engrossing. We continued with great enthusiasm at the Pide House restaurant in Civic.
We are also supporting the Writers Centre by sponsoring a session at its 'Turn the page' literary festival on Saturday 18 October. We will keep you posted on developments in the next newsletter and on the website.
While I was the target of rude comments and sniggers at the committee meeting for suggesting that the year is almost over, I do not resile from my belief that it will be November before we know it and that we need to get cracking on the end-of-year function. Your committee is now putting its considerable skill into organising this important social and professional event. Stand by for exciting developments!
Claudia Marchesi
This amusing article appeared in the July edition of Book Worm, the Western Australian Society of Editors newsletter, and is reproduced here with their kind permission.
Some delightful letters appear in British newspapers on topics that never get aired so in Australia. A recent series in the Times has addressed the matter of word breaks in that newspaper, which now seems to be governed by spacing rather than good practice - virtually all the principles set out on p. 94 of the Style manual (6th edn) have been discarded. One reader thought that 'the stupidest word break I have seen [was] … Canaletto's View of Horseg-uard's Parade. It even beats "bat-hroom"'. Another was glad that a certain bridge player was continuing his practice of 'betrotting the glo' while another liked 'bed-raggled' as it described what she saw in the mirror first thing in the morning. One of the most scrumptious I have spotted was 'candi-date'. Then there was a headline with the word-break hyphen missing: 'Squad helps dog bite victim'.
How would you interpret a roadworks sign, common in Britain, that advises 'Expect delays until April 2004'? Would you ensure that you have a good supply of food etc. in your car?
Or the advertising poster on trains that begins 'If you live in and around London …' That's a pretty big area to occupy.
Labelling is also going well; for example, cans of tomato soup with the prominent advice 'Suitable for vegetarians', and an item of clothing made in Thailand that carries the warning 'Do not drumble dry'.
A Very Descript Man, by J. H. Parker
I am such a dolent man,
I eptly work each day;
My acts are all becilic,
I've just ane things to say.My nerves are strung, my hair is kempt,
I'm gusting and I'm span;
I look with dain on everyone
And am a pudent man.I travel cognito and make
A delible impression;
I overcome a slight cholance,
With gruntled self-possession.My dignation would be great
If I should digent be;
I trust my vagance will bring
An astrous life for me.
Alex George
Time and date: 6.30 pm. Wednesday 30 July 2003
Place: Common Room, University House
Australian National University
The President, Ed Highley, opened the meeting at 6.40 pm. and welcomed everyone.
Present were: Ted Briggs, Janelle Caiger, Karen Deighton-Smith, James Dixon, Louise Forster, Susan Hampton, Tracy Harwood, Ed Highley, Peter Judge, Lee Kirwan, Campbell MacKnight, Pete Martensz, Kerry MacDermott, Claudia Marchesi, Elizabeth Murphy, Ara Nalbandian, Kerie Newell, Cathy Nicoll, Louise Oliver, Ann Parkinson, Sharen Phillips, Kris Rogers, Lee-Ling Sim, Lucy Tylman, Helen Topor, Colin Watson, Michael Welbourn, Damaris Wilson, Virginia Wilton.
Apologies were received from Greg Baker, John Champness, Aedeen Cremin, Peter Henderson, Allison Ley, Alexa O'Laughlin.
Minutes of 2002 AGM: Lee Kirwan moved that the minutes be accepted. Kerry MacDermott seconded the motion.
Ed gave an update on some of the issues discussed at the previous AGM:
Newsletter costs: The committee had discussed the high cost of the newsletter, but had decided to keep it as it is for the moment, given its importance as a promotional tool.
Promotion of the society: Some exciting ventures were in the pipeline for promoting the society in association with CASE.
Personalised membership cards: These have been implemented and one Canberra bookstore has agreed to give a discount on presentation of a current membership card.
Fees increase: Fees have increased but the increase was not applied retrospectively.
Ed said that his report was basically the same as published in the President's column in the July newsletter and distributed at the meeting. He highlighted:
• the varied meeting program;
• our healthy financial situation, which includes a significant surplus to be used to help meet members' needs;
• our training program, which is potentially the most important activity of the society and a good case could be made for it to have first call on our financial resources;
• the award for Excellence in Editing that the society is offering this year for the best-edited annual report published in Canberra, and which the committee hopes will become an annual event, focusing on a different class of publication each year; and
• strong support for, and involvement in, CASE activities, such as attendance at the national conference (nineteen Canberra editors attended) and support for the draft proposal for accreditation.
He finished by thanking each of the committee members for their work during the year, and
acknowledged the contribution of Pete Martensz, the retiring treasurer, over the previous two years.
Pete Martensz drew members' attention to the
financial summary. He highlighted some points:
• Income for the year was $24,828, the main three components of which were membership subscriptions ($6,435), training courses ($8,280) and a one-off payment from the joint Editors and Indexers
Conference ($8,543). Expenditure was $15,742, leaving a surplus of $9,086. He warned that we should not be too complacent about the size of this surplus, since if it wasn't for the one-off payment it would only be $530.
• The interest on the capital investment of $17,000 helps pay for the operation of the Society, for example it has been enough to pay for the newsletter, especially since we started doing our own folding to cut expenses.
• He suggested that there was potential for reducing expenditure, for example in some of our catering.
• The relatively large amount in Members Funds ($19,974) is due to the move to accrual accounting rather than representing a real increase in membership. Pete is concerned that a significant number of members have not renewed.
He ended by thanking members for their co-operation over the year.
Kerry MacDermott moved that the Treasurer's Report be accepted. Peter Judge seconded the motion.
In accepting the report, Ed highlighted the increased income from training courses, especially from the Plain English course run by Elizabeth Murphy for GeoSciences Australia. There appeared to be a high demand for training and the potential for us to expand our activities in this area is significant.
Ed thanked Pete for his hard work, which has left the society in such a good financial position, and moved a vote of thanks. The motion was carried with acclamation.
Cathy Nicoll reported that:
• Helen Topor ran a successful proofreading course, and this is likely to be run at least one more time.
• There are regular requests for courses on editing and related topics. In response to one such request, we ran a Plain English course for GeoSciences Australia. Elizabeth Murphy developed and presented it on behalf of CSE. It went well and did a lot to raise the profile of the society and for editors in general, as well as being good financially.
• The next activity is likely to be a copy-editing course for the Meetings Industry Association of Australia (MIAA). We are determining requirements and Helen Topor is likely to be the presenter.
• We will also develop and run a copy-editing course for CSE members.
• We are looking at a workshop on business aspects of editing, similar to ones that societies in other states have done.
Cathy urged people to tell her what they need. Training for members will become even more important when accreditation becomes a reality.
Ed said that training had been a big issue at the conference and at the CASE meeting. CASE is going to conduct a national training audit to see both what is required and what is available. The aim is a more coordinated approach to training across the various societies.
Ed thanked Cathy and everyone who had helped for their excellent work.
Ed reported that the Accreditation Working Group within CASE has put forward a proposal. There was warm support for the proposal both at the conference and in the CASE meeting. Societies have been asked to examine it in detail and provide feedback by the end of November. The Working Group will finalise the proposal based on the feedback and put forward a final proposal to CASE.
Ed said that there was considerable support in CASE for setting it up as a more formal national organisation, as part of which he has volunteered to develop a CASE website. Initially this would be primarily a portal to the individual society websites.
Ed mentioned the best-edited annual report award and said that entries close on 30 September. Jack Waterford has agreed to present the award at an end-of-year dinner.
In comments from the meeting, there was concern that it might not be feasible for people to submit reports by then because it is before the date they have to be tabled, and even if the reports are ready they might be embargoed. Ed replied that, since the award is for editing, it is only necessary to have the text, not the completed report, so they could be submitted before they are tabled. However, it might be necessary to look at whether reports being embargoed represented a problem for entrants.
The President and Treasurer were not eligible to stand again. The Vice-President (Kerry
MacDermott) and Secretary (Ted Briggs) had nominated for re-election, as had the remaining committee members. Louise Oliver had also nominated for a committee position and Lucy Tylman nominated from the floor, with a particular interest in the catering coordination role.
No nominations for President had been received, but Claudia Marchesi was nominated by Cathy Nicoll and seconded by Ann Parkinson. All were elected.
No nomination was received for Treasurer, so the position was left vacant.
The meeting closed at 7.35 pm.
After the meeting Louise Oliver volunteered to take on the Treasurer position. Her offer was accepted.
Ted Briggs 30 July 2003
STATEMENT OF ASSETS AND LIABILITIES AS AT 30 JUNE 2003
Note 2 Investments: This balance represents the amount held in an investment with Colonial First State Bank.
Note 3 Membership Fees: The Society moved to accrual accounts on 30 June 2001. Under accrual reporting, these fees are now recorded in the financial year to which they relate. An amount of $175 (2002: $2,765) is recorded as unearned revenue. Of this amount $135 (2002: $2,375) represents fees for 2003-04 paid in 2002-03.
Members now have a unique opportunity to shape the future of the editing profession.
The Accreditation Working Group (AWG), which is a subcommittee of the Council of Australian Societies of Editors (CASE), has prepared a draft proposal for accreditation of editors in Australia. The Draft Report of the Accreditation Working Group has been circulated to all the societies of editors for comment until 30 November 2003. It is available in PDF format on our website (and on the websites of all the Australian editors' societies).
The proposed accreditation scheme is devised by editors for editors. It will be set up, administered and controlled by editors. By adopting it, we will pre-empt any other body that might seek to regulate entry to the profession, such as the Australian National Training Authority, who would then tell us whether or not we met their requirements.
A profession has two essential components: a body of knowledge, and a method of screening out incompetent practitioners. Editors have defined the body of knowledge in Australian Standards for Editing Practice, and the next step is to identify competent editors. We have been talking about an accreditation scheme for many years, and at last we have a concrete proposal in front of us.
The draft report was well received at the national conference in Brisbane in July. To quote one of the conference participants, it has turned accreditation 'from an unwieldy mass of difficulties into a clear, achievable, worthwhile objective'.
The proposal follows the criteria of the Accreditation Issues Paper that was put to members in June 2002 (and is also available on our website), for a scheme that is fair, transparent, appropriate, inclusive, consistent, flexible, acceptable, sustainable, accountable, and takes account of existing education and training.
The scheme tests competence rather than excellence. It seeks to accommodate all the sorts of people who might apply: young editors at the beginning of their careers, senior editors arriving from other countries, people outside the book industry whose work includes some editing, experienced professionals in other fields who find themselves drawn into editing. The scheme also attempts to ensure that compliance is not onerous and that applications are relatively easy to prepare.
Members have asked whether CASE might experience legal problems in operating an accreditation scheme: either complaints from clients and employers about the work of accredited editors, or objections from applicants who are refused accreditation. The draft report has been submitted to the Arts Law Centre in Sydney and incorporates their suggestions; it should therefore be legally sound.
Consultation
AWG is now seeking comment on the draft report in order to make sure that the proposed scheme meets members' needs. The deadline for comment is 30 November 2003. By that date, each society of editors must send CASE a collated report of comments from its members. This is the last round of consultation before the scheme is finalised and put to members for acceptance or rejection.
When the comments are received, AWG will refine the report in accordance with the feedback and, early in 2004, present its final proposal to CASE for voting by members.
Canberra workshop
To facilitate the consultation process in Canberra, our October meeting (Wednesday 29 October) will be a structured workshop to discuss the Draft Report of the Accreditation Working Group. Supper will be provided to extend the time available for discussion, break-out workshop groups and initial drafting of a response to CASE (more details will be provided in the next newsletter).
Please download the report, study it and discuss it with colleagues. Send or email your preliminary thoughts to me (Janet Salisbury - see below) or another committee member by Wednesday 22 October. This will allow us time to collate your comments and make final plans for the workshop. Individual members may wish to try out the proposed points system on themselves and let us know how it works for them and any problems that they can see with it.
Then block out Wednesday 29 October 6-9 pm. in your diaries and make a firm resolution to come along and take part in these ground-breaking discussions for our profession.
Janet Salisbury
(Canberra delegate to the CASE Accreditation Working Group)
Email: <janet.salisbury@biotext.com.au>
Tel. (02) 6282 2280
For several months before the national editors conference, I was seriously dragging my heels about whether I should go or not. I was going overseas in May and June to visit family and attend two other conferences (see elsewhere in this newsletter) and I knew that my feet would have hardly touched the ground before I would be off again to Brisbane - it all seemed too much to cope with.
However, I am a member of the CASE Accreditation Working Group (AWG), which was due to present a draft of its proposals for an accreditation program for Australian editors at the conference, and I really wanted to catch up with my wonderful interstate colleagues and see how our proposals would be received. So, rather belatedly, I decided to enrol - and am I glad I did! From the moment I arrived, I was thrown into stimulating conversations with other editors, and many of the sessions were extremely interesting and useful. The conference dinner was great fun (including the Elizabethan dancing mentioned by Elizabeth Murphy in the last newsletter), and on the next evening there was some serious discussion and lots more fun and laughter at dinner with my fellow AWG members.
The shining beacon for me that made the whole trip really worthwhile was a talk by Cathy Gray and Alison White on single-source publishing. Cathy is a freelance editor from Sydney, former president of the Society of Editors (NSW) and member of the CASE Standards Working Group. Alison White is a designer with many years of experience in corporate and technical publishing and a particular interest in multiplatform, single-source publishing.
I had been giving a lot of thought over recent months to the problems of juggling Word documents, designed documents for print publishing and HTML files for web publishing. You must all be familiar with the problem: government client has document in Word and needs to keep it that way for writing, editing, tracking changes and committee approvals. But the publication is going to be professionally designed, so off it goes to a designer who converts it to Quark, Pagemaker or similar. Then it comes back for proofing and you make corrections to the hard copy and the designer enters them in the design file. However, the client wants the document back in Word so that they can keep an archived copy ready for next year's updates; therefore you have to make the proofing changes there as well. Oh, and, by the way, they also want an HTML file … So, now you have three files - Word, design and HTML - and then the CEO decides to change a few (or even several) things before the document finally goes to print, so you grit your teeth and put the changes into all three files!
With all this in mind, Cathy and Alison's presentation was like music to my ears! Working together in a superb example of editor-designer teamwork, they have developed a system for taking documents from Word to print-ready and HTML outputs via a single master file in Framemaker (an Adobe product similar to Pagemaker but with far more features). In their talk, they took us step by step through two major projects that they have completed using this method: a 330-page statistical reference book for the Australian film industry, which was simultaneously published as a website, and a set of public environment reports for a Sydney water utility, which were published in print, on CD and on the web.
Each project involved detailed initial planning of the whole project and a developmental and editing stage by Cathy in Word (with various iterations, approvals and so on). At the same time, Alison developed the 'information architecture' for the print and HTML versions in Framemaker. When the editing was complete, the files were copied into one Framemaker master document. Into this file, Alison coded all the instructions for both the print and HTML outputs. For a cross-reference, for example, the print version had a page reference and the HTML version had a link (these alternatives were tagged as 'conditional text' so as to go either one way or the other, according to the output required). To meet accessibility guidelines, tables were exported through different filters for print and HTML versions, but all from the same master file, using the conditional text tags. Chapter and heading numbering, navigational tools and so on were similarly coded to suit the print or HTML outputs.
The end result was that either the print-ready file or the HTML file could be produced at the click of a mouse from the same 'single-source file'. Corrections only needed to be made in one file. What is more, because they had used styles very carefully in the original Word document, at another click or two of the mouse, Framemaker could produce an RTF file that was very close to the Word original in formatting (including tables) and could be archived for future use in Word. How clever is that!
There is an obvious huge advantage of this approach for publications that require frequent minor updates (such as manuals and guidelines), because changes can be made to the master document and the revised print and HTML output created simultaneously. However, I also think that this process would have great benefits for publications that require more substantive updates but are based on a similar structure and content (such as annual reports); once the Framemaker master file is set up for the first edition, updates could be made in subsequent editions without completely reinventing the wheel each time. Changes to visual design elements could also be made to alter the 'look' of a publication edition by edition, if required, without changing the underlying information architecture.
Some people may say that this process is only one step along a pathway that will ultimately involve more sophisticated systems using XML. But, for my money, it is a highly practical and achievable method with the potential to be useful for a variety of publishing projects. It also shows what can be achieved through closer collaboration between editors and designers. Well done Cathy and Alison!
Janet Salisbury
It's been in the news lately: the website that encourages readers to release their favourite books into the wild, to bring joy to others (and, presumably, free the books to achieve their potential).
BookCrossing (BC) - <http://www.bookcrossing.com> - is a website based on the idea that many people like to buy and read books but don't necessarily want to keep them. Now the books can be passed to other keen, and unknown, readers who will, hopefully, note the books' progress on the website.
The system is easy: register a book free on the website to gain its BCID (BookCrossing ID number), label the book with its BCID and some instructions for the finder, and release the book by leaving it in a suitable spot (the website suggests not leaving books in airport lounges but bus stops, health centres and cafés are favourite sites). You don't need to use your own name and you can add comments about the book when you register it.
You would be one of a growing band. There are already many keen BCers in Canberra - one Canberran, Peter Mackay, is Australia's top BCer, having released 377 books, including a full set of encyclopaedias in April 2003 for BC's second anniversary, according to the Weekend Australian, 9-10 August 2003, p. R6.
Check out the list of books released into the wild in Canberra at
<http://www.bookcrossing.com/hunt/4/66/31296>,
and go on a hunt for them, or release some of your own - The Idiot's Guide to Plain English near government offices or Punctuation for Dummies among the potatoe's at the Fyshwick Markets, perhaps?
Ann Parkinson
It seems that so many people were disappointed to miss the first proofreading course in June this year that we just have to run it again.
CIT lecturer Helen Topor will be taking us through the basics, teaching us how to spot errors efficiently and mark up the corrections. The final part of the session will take participants through some of the challenges for proofreaders - for example dealing with ridiculously tight deadlines and how to mark up a page that is already choked with errors and proofreading marks.
Afternoon tea is included. Please advise of any dietary restrictions when you register.
Registration must be received by 15 October - just send your name, telephone number, email address and postal address, with your cheque, to the
Treasurer, Canberra Society of Editors Inc,
PO Box 3222,
Manuka ACT 2603.
Beryl Hill and Elizabeth Flann are currently researching a revised and updated edition of the Australian Editing Handbook. They would very much appreciate any input from members about what they would like to see in the updated version: what needs expanding; what could be cut or deleted; what is most/least important to them. They would be particularly interested to hear stories about members' experiences with on-screen editing. Success stories and horror stories are equally welcome. You can email Beryl at <bjhill@bigpond.net.au> or Elizabeth at <flanne@deakin.edu.au>.
If so, it means that you've forgotten to renew your membership. Such oversights are all too easy in today's busy (or in most cases, frantic) world, but, reluctantly, we will not be sending you any newsletters from now on unless your payment is received by 30 September. Current membership subscription rates are:
Full Members $60, Associate $45, Student $30.
If you intend to resign - and we certainly hope that that's not the case - please let us know, so that we can amend our membership lists.
24 September: September general meeting
3 October: October newsletter deadline
24 October: Proofreading for beginners training course
29 October: October general meeting - Accreditation workshop
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 October.
Mail contributions on a 3.5 inch disk, using Word for Windows (essential) or email (preferable), to:
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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