Accreditation exam workshop series (UPDATED AGAIN 31 August 2020)

Friday, 14 August 2020
Griffith Neighbourhood Hall
Cost: CSE members: $200 per workshop, $300 for two. Non-members: $280 per workshop.

About the course

The IPEd Accreditation exam will be held on Saturday 5 December 2020. If there is even a slight chance that you will sit the exam, it’s time to start preparing.

It’s not an easy exam, so we have packaged three workshops for you.

You can attend any or all of the following training workshops, which will cover copyediting, grammar and the exam itself. These are designed primarily to help candidates prepare for the exam, but they will also be useful to any editor who wants to learn or put a bit of polish on their skills. You may also wish to attend if you are still undecided.

Copyediting for accreditation

Cathy Nicoll AE will take you through the basics of copyediting, including the levels of editing; introduce you to the art of completing a style sheet; and discuss ways of making changes and providing useful comments to authors. This full-day workshop aims to help you prepare for the MANUSCRIPT part of the IPEd accreditation exam – the 45-minute copyediting exercise. It sounds so easy (‘just’ a copyedit), but it tests many of the skills a professional editor is expected to have. Some skills needed in the KNOWLEDGE part will also be covered.

The topics cover the areas where examiners report that people have most trouble:

• Keeping to a copyedit: how much and how little can you do in terms of the text and the time available (and how to avoid accidentally lurching into doing a substantive edit and wasting precious exam time)?
• Consistency. Consistency. Consistency. Should I say it again? Consistency. Style sheets are a blessing, not a burden. Learn how to use the MANUSCRIPT style sheet to help your editing and your exam technique.
• Tricky copyediting topics: lists, tables, captions and more. These often come up in the KNOWLEDGE part of the exam, so we’ll spend some time going through the basics to help you prepare.

There’s bound to be some solid discussion of many aspects of editing that crop up as questions from editors and prospective editors.

Cathy Nicoll (B Nat Res (Hons), Grad Dip Ed, TESOL Cert IV) AE is a freelance writer and accredited editor who feels like every editing job is a bit of an exam. Her background is in environmental management, science and teaching, but she has expanded her interests and spent more than two decades writing and editing government publications to make them usable and interesting enough for people to want to read and use them. She currently spends most of her working time on instructional publications and training material for a large government department.

Grammar in a nutshell

RESCHEDULED: NOW Saturday 12 September, online. All registered have been notified.

This full day will take you through many of the problem areas of English grammar that you may not have learnt at school or may have forgotten. The workshop includes activities to help you prepare for the IPEd Accreditation exam, but it is useful for everyone, whether exam candidate or not. Some activities imitate the exam parts LANGUAGE and KNOWLEDGE.

We will concentrate on the basic conventions of present-day English grammar that we all need in our writing and that all editors need to understand so that they can edit confidently and explain edits to clients. We will work through some common grammatical problems. Your workbook will become a useful reference book.

Topics will include:

• the parts of speech (word classes) and the functions of each
• adding things together: words > phrases > clauses > sentences > paragraphs
• problem areas, including: spelling, apostrophes, parallel structure, bullets, dashes, I/me, who/whom and sorting out some confusions in grammar
• introducing plain English.

We can email more activities for you to do at home on your computer. We offer feedback and a free private email consultation. Grammar in a nutshell relates closely to Elizabeth’s latest book, Effective writing: plain English at work – 2nd edition, which will be referred to throughout the day.

Elizabeth Manning Murphy BA (Hons) DE has been editing nearly all her life. Her academic background is in linguistics. She specialises in editing research theses and academic journal articles. She runs English grammar workshops worldwide, helps run the IPEd Mentoring Program and has written many books, including Working words, published by CSE.

Accreditation exam preparation

Ted Briggs AE presents this interactive workshop, aimed at people thinking about sitting the IPEd accreditation exam. Even if you decide not to sit the exam, you will learn about various aspects of editing that you can incorporate into your current work as an editor. The workshop is also a great opportunity to meet other editors. There will be a mix of presentations, group discussion and editing exercises.

The workshop will cover:

• strategies for preparing for the exam and managing your time
• practice exercises
• tips for working with Word and PDF
• what to expect on the day
• study resources, and more.

Ted Briggs AE is an accredited editor and an Honorary Life Member of both CSE and IPEd. He has been on the Accreditation Board since 2012, serving as the chair from 2013 to 2017. He has also been a joint national coordinator of the IPEd Mentoring Program for Editors since its inception in 2012 as a pilot program in CSE.