Dr Robert Nichols, Senior Editor, Military History Section, at the Australian War Memorial will look at the mechanics of writing and editing museum labels and also at some of the more philosophical issues that arise.
In particular, he will talk about how to deal with authors (usually curators or historians) and designers. The former invariably flout Voltaire's dictum ('the secret to being boring is to leave nothing out') and can never see any justification for omitting even the dullest and most arcane excursus; the latter will always sacrifice words to graphic style.
And then there are the competing demands of audience and institution to consider. What do visitors to an exhibition need (or want) to know? What are the most significant messages a label should convey? What sorts of information should a label be given over to?
As usual, 6.00 for 6.30 pm in the Fellows Lounge of the National Library. There will be a dinner afterwards, at some modest local hostelry, with the chance to continue the discussion.
The Society's Annual dinner, an event not to be missed!
- Next meeting
- From the President
- Annual dinner
- IPEd notes
- Digital copyright
- Minding my p's and q's
- Indexing for non-indexers
Track changers with Virginia Wilton- Thinking about words
- Training notes
- Copyright and deadlines
A large part of our September committee meeting was devoted to discussing matters arising from a recent teleconference of the accreditation board. Each society has been asked to nominate assessors for the initial stage of the process we are about to begin as a national organisation of professionals.
I'd like to thank Elizabeth Murphy, Chris Pirie, Janet Salisbury and Loma Snooks for kindly agreeing to act as our society's nominees. Your committee was unanimous in deciding to ask these distinguished fellow-editors to take on this responsibility. Their agreement in principle is all the more laudable as its extent and nature were not yet clear at the time of writing. I hope that we will have achieved a great deal at the upcoming national conference to clarify this and other matters by the time that you are reading these words.
In anticipation of decisions to be made at the conference, the committee has decided to dedicate the first meeting of next year to a workshop on accreditation--as the other societies will be doing--and what it will mean for all of us as working editors. So put a red circle around 22 February 2006 in your diary now.
A major focus for our activity as a society in 2006 will be the second of our highly successful Ed•Ex events, now set for 3 June 2006. The organising committee, led by Shirley Dyson, is already actively investigating possibilities and would welcome any suggestions you might have to make the day as useful as possible for all who participate.
Finally, I urge everyone to make another firm entry in their diary for our end-of-year dinner, which promises to be especially memorable (see below for details). This year's speaker, I can promise you, is well worth coming for!
Virginia Wilton
The Society's annual dinner for 2005 will be held in Rydge's Capital Hill on Wednesday 30 November at 7.00 for 7.30 pm. Our guest will be Robin Wallace-Crabbe, author, artist and brilliant raconteur. The cost will not exceed $40, including a pre-dinner glass of something delicious. Mark this date in your diary--RSVPs will open in our next issue, early next month.
By the time you read this, the second national conference will have come and gone. As I write, the emails are flying among IPEd delegates and the Accreditation Board to prepare their presentations for the conference.
During the last few weeks the state and territory societies have held workshops and discussions in response to the Issues Paper prepared by the National Organis-ation Working Group. The paper set out the possible legal structures that a national organisation could adopt.
Its reception has been generally favourable, but members have many questions they want answered before we go ahead. Two critical matters are the balance between the societies and the national body, and costs and sources of funds.
The formation of the national organisation will be further discussed in a plenary session at the conference. If you have not been able to attend the conference or your society's discussion, send comments and questions on the Issues Paper to your society's IPEd delegate. All feedback will be taken into account as the outline is refined into a formal proposal, and of course no move will be made without the explicit approval of the membership.
Most of the members of the National Organisation Working Group have chosen to end their involvement at this point, so we are looking for volunteers to re-form the group and move things forward.
People with legal knowledge and/or experience in the admin-istration of similar organisations would be particularly welcome, but your enthusiasm is a sufficient qualification.
This is a chance to serve your profession at a crucial point in its evolution and to make friends with your peers and colleagues in other parts of the country. Contact your IPEd delegate, listed on the website at <www.case-editors.org>.
Janet Mackenzie, IPEd liaison officer
Are you up to speed on the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000? The Copyright Agency Limited has a summary of what you can and cannot do (mainly the latter) on its website <www.copyright.com.au>. The key section in its two-page PDF document on 'Copyright and the Internet' reads:
'No. If you copy material off the Internet without permission you may be infringing the rights of a copyright owner. It is a common misconception that once material is posted to the Internet it can be freely copied: this is not the case.
'With the rapid expansion of Internet technology, legislators recently moved to formalise copyright protection for material found on the Internet. In 2001, the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Act 2000 came into effect. This amendment gives the copyright owners of material on the Internet certain exclusive rights. These include:
This means that you may be infringing the rights of a copyright owner if you:
It's worth a look at the whole paper...
Peter Judge
I am currently helping to rewrite a house style guide for a client. When I got to the punctuation section, I did a double-take--there seemed to me to be many examples of punctuation marks gone feral. It got me thinking about all punctuations marks and their necessity or otherwise. I don't have space for too many examples, but here are a few:
My basic contention is that punctuation is supposed to make the text clearer, more meaningful, than it would have been otherwise. An example from my book Effective writing: plain English at work shows what can happen to meaning when essential commas are missing:
The work will be undertaken by Peterson Brothers Abercrombie Jones and Parker and Knight Industries. Without commas, we have no idea whether three or four firms are involved in the work.
When the chairman finishes the keynote address will begin. The reader ploughs on and is brought up short at the verb, then has to backtrack and read it again, inserting a pause after 'finishes':
When the chairman finishes, the keynote address will begin.
But do we need all of the punctuation marks that still litter our pages? Take the full stop, for instance:
In the bad old days, we put full stops after all contractions of titles and after initials, as in Dr. A. B. Smith. Now we're told that if the contraction consists of the first and last letters of the full title ('Doctor' here), we don't need a full stop. So now we can refer to Dr Smith. What about A. B.? The jury is out on this one--I prefer no full stops, but I do like to leave a space between the letters because each one represents a whole name. I don't like Dr AB Smith--I prefer Dr A B Smith. To me, Dr A. B. Smith is a hybrid and therefore unacceptable.
What about other shortened forms?
Some short forms seem to attract a full stop in the singular but not in the plural (presumably because the letter s constitutes the last letter of the word)--for example, para. and paras, fig. and figs. I can't see the need for retaining the full stop--to me, para and fig, in context, are meaningful and acceptable.
Then there is the Style Manual recommendation that the abbreviations for Victoria and Tasmania should take full stops but that for Queensland should not--Vic., Tas. have full stops--Qld apparently does not, presumably in accordance with the 'first and last letter' principle. I don't see the need for any full stops, and mercifully all become equal in capitals in envelope addresses: VIC, TAS, QLD.
The style guide I'm helping to update still insists on full stops in abbreviations like e.g., i.e., a.m., p.m. and no. for 'number'. Eh? Something wrong in that collection. Which is the odd one out? It's no. This is not an abbreviation of number at all--it's a contraction of numero and so, along with the removal of the full stop after the contraction Mr, shouldn't have a full stop at all. The argument for retaining the full stop is that it could be confused with the negative no. Well! I would have thought that most authors could manage to write sentences where such confusion wouldn't arise--and if they can't, that's what editors are for. Granted, e.g. is a genuine abbreviation, but do the full stops enhance its meaning? I think not. In the middle of a sentence, I have no problem with eg or ie, but given that most people don't know the difference between them, I wouldn't use them at all--I'd write for example and that is out in full. What's wrong with 9 am, 5 pm and No 96?
There seems to be particular confusion about how to express the time of day--five o'clock in the morning is expressed variously as 5am, 5 am and 5 a.m. My vote goes to 5 am because the figure 5 represents a whole word and therefore deserves a space after it, and am is perfectly clear without any full stops.
Commas turn up, or don't turn up, in odd places too. In some style guides, users are told to put commas between the hundreds and thousands in all numbers: 2,500 as well as 350,000. Some say don't bother if the number is only four figures long, so we have 2500 and 350,000 in the one document. Others say no commas at all, but leave a space instead: 2 500 and 350 000. Well, I like consistency, so I'd prefer to do the same thing throughout one document, and I must admit to being wary of the 'space' version because I think it can be confusing to the reader. Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather put the comma in.
The mix of single and double quotation marks that I see in documents is amazing. In the dark ages of typewriters we were taught to use double quotation marks for all quotations, with single for quotations within quotations. The general rule in Australia is now the reverse of that: 'aaa "bbb" ccc'--avoids too much use of the shift key on computer keyboards. It seems to be taking a long time for this one to sink in, perhaps because of the quantity of American literature we read. The American rule remains the older rule: "xxx 'yyy' zzz". Depending on where the document is to be published, we need to pick the appropriate rule, and not mix them in the one document.
Another muddle is the en dash/em dash one. This newsletter prefers the unspaced em dash in text--like that. It's neat. However, I have seen instructions to use a spaced en dash in similar situations - like that, or even a spaced em dash -- thus. A document that I looked at recently contained all three versions, as the author clearly had no guidance from anywhere as to what to use. I really don't like the spaced em dash, but the others are fine, provided they are used consistently and provided the font being used makes one or the other more appropriate.
And the hyphen is still being used to death. When will we stop writing e-mail and co-ordinator as advised by one guide I've seen, and drop the unnecessary hyphen? Email and coordinator are perfectly clear. I think words like e-commerce need a hyphen still, but the day of ecommerce may be looming up. The em and en dashes mentioned above are also often referred to as em-dashes and en-dashes--unnecessary as em and en are perfectly good whole words in printing terminology. I'm glad to see the one word website being advised by our Victorian cousins--Society of Editors (Victoria) Inc Newsletter (September 2005).
The English language, including its punctuation, is constantly on the move, so we're never going to see hard-and-fast (or hard and fast) rules for the use of punctuation and other devices. My only rule is to use punctuation marks to make meaning clear. If a full stop does nothing to enhance meaning, I prefer not to use it. If it does enhance meaning then use it. (Did you want to put a comma after meaning?)
The poor little apostrophe comes in for a lot of comment, but what about the question of whether or not to use apostrophes in plurals? I certainly don't advocate what's called the greengrocer's apostrophe (Today's specials: onion's, apple's …), but I do subscribe to the society for the preservation of the apostrophe--in its proper place. You can't write There are four s's in Mississippi or Minding my p's and q's or Dot your i's and cross your t's any other way. But you don't need apostrophes in expressions such as the 1930s or the NSW TAFEs--they would do nothing to enhance meaning.
As editors I believe we should concentrate on conveying meaning clearly. If punctuation marks help, use them. If they don't, then don't litter the text with them.
© Elizabeth Manning Murphy 2005
Editor's note: for this web version, the en dashes in Elizabeth's article have been replaced by hyphens, and the em dashes by double hyphens -- . This is because some web browsers don't accept these dashes but display them as "&endash;' or '&emdash;', which is tiresome and confusing. However, this necessary change does spoil that critical paragraph...
Our speaker at the September general meeting was Lynn Farkas, President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers, who had some very cogent advice on indexing for non-indexers. Lynn stressed the need for an index in any serious reference book and suggested that you should preferably employ an indexer! But if you insist on doing it yourself, don't use word processing index generators--invest in indexing software (Cindex, Macrex and SkyIndex are used by professional indexers around the world), buy the latest Style Manual and study the chapter on indexing, and visit the ANZSI website at <www.aussi.org>.
Lynn then took us though the sequence of the basic processes for creating an index, but warned that indexing is an intellectual task undertaken by information analysts. Only experience, practice and a predisposition for information retrieval can help you decide what to include and what not to, how to identify key concepts, and how to present your index in a clear and concise manner:
Notes by Lynn Farkas
This month Louise Forster interviews Society President, Virginia Wilton.
I've lived in Canberra on and off since 1956. I went to school here and I studied at Sydney University and then ANU. I studied Russian and English at ANU and I was, for my sins, president of the Literary Society. We put out an extremely extravagant journal called Prometheus. The art director was John Reid, who's now at the School of Art. That was fun and there were a lot of excellent writers published in that issue of Prometheus--Gerard Windsor, Alan Gould, Bob Brissenden, and the poet Martin Johnston, who was a friend of mine.
I left Canberra and went to Papua New Guinea, where I taught for three years. I put out a magazine with the lovely name Titpuke (pron. 'tit-pook-ay') for the school I was teaching at on Manus Island. I was the editor and the kids helped out with that.
From Manus Island I went to New York City where I did an MA and then an MPhil in Slavic languages and literature at Columbia University. I did postgraduate studies in Russian literature for about 15 years, on and off--really just doing scholarly stuff, which is actually excellent training for editing.
After Columbia I came back to ANU to do a PhD, having just married. I had a baby and then another baby and I was thinking, 'Oh, well, you just go on with it. No, I won't change. I can do a PhD, I can have the baby, I can do this, that and the other thing'. But in the end the PhD petered away into the sand and I had the children (four, eventually) and went into teaching.
I taught at schools and university and TAFE for the next few years, teaching a lot of different things--English, history, English as a second language, communications. Again, teaching English is quite a good training for an editor because what you're doing is continually reading things that people have written and helping them to improve their writing, thinking about their writing, thinking about the way they've structured their writing. So I did that for quite a long time.
Then I decided I wanted flexibility. I was lucky enough to know Lindsay Mackerras who offered me some work with the then AGPS. I cut my teeth on the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines. This was just before the March 1996 election. Almost simultaneously with that I applied for and got a job as the managing editor of the Canberra Bulletin of Public Administration and did that for four or five years as well. That was a part-time job.
Now I have a business and a few people working for me and I call myself a publisher. I don't actually do all that much editing now, even though it's what I really enjoy doing.
One of the things that I've been pretty preoccupied with over the last few years is learning about business, learning about running my own business, which is something that I never thought I'd be doing. It's just evolved. Now I'm mainly involved in management: project management, managing people, managing a business. I suppose many of the skills that you use in editing you use in business; you have to be quite organised.
Every publishing job is like walking on a tightrope. There's always the possibility that you're going to fall off. Something's going to go wrong. I suppose that's part of the fascination of the process.
But balancing that is the huge satisfaction of producing a very good product. To me there's still a great thrill--because I've always loved books and reading--of holding something that's well done, that you can be proud of. That happens often enough to keep me going.
The other thing I love about it is you just actually never know what's going to happen; what new job is going to walk in through the door. There's enough variety to make it continually interesting.
What about the professionalisation of editing?
Obviously we've taken huge steps in the last five years in starting to put the processes into place for accreditation and for having a national organisation. Those two things go together. The problem that we seem to have now is that we're just teetering on the brink and we have to jump in at the deep end. Without those two things I think editing will continue to be a rather genteel occupation, if I can put it like that.
What do you hope to achieve during your tenure as President of the Canberra society?
What I'd like to see at the end of my tenure is a national organisation that's been set up in accordance with the wishes of the broad majority of members of editors societies around Australia. I'd like to see us having made a serious beginning with the process of accreditation. So that's what I will be focusing on.
Apart from your business and your involvement in the editing society, what else do you do?
My great love is travel. So any chance I get that's what I do. I lived for many years in New York and I have many dear friends there and also a brother so I go back there whenever I can, which is not often enough, but once every couple of years usually.
Reading is my great relaxation. I don't think a day goes by where I haven't spent at least half an hour, probably more, reading something that is completely unrelated to what I'm working on. Usually it's a decent novel.
Recent travels?
The last trip I took was to Tasmania, which is over the water at least.
I'd love to go back to Russia again. I was in Russia at a very interesting time. My last trip (of three) was just before Brezhnev died, about six or seven years before perestroika, so it was still very firmly Soviet. That's where I'd most love to go back.
Finally …?
I'd just like to say that for me, you know, the editors society has been incredibly important. When I joined I was immediately thrust into the job of treasurer, so that was fun. You know, you often get people saying, 'Well, I'd like to be editor, how do I start?' I always say, 'Join the society, meet people', because I've learnt so much from other editors.
One of the most interesting things I've done recently was to enter, and become a finalist in, the Telstra Businesswoman of the Year awards. I found it a fascinating experience because you have to look back over your whole career, your whole life. You have to talk to people who have worked for you and get feedback from them. You have to think hard about what it is that you do professionally--the way you do things, and the extent that you're interested in innovation, trying different things and learning.
Louise Forster and Virginia Wilton
With Elizabeth's charming article on the 'Norfuk' language still fresh in my mind, I recently enjoyed a day trip from St Malo to Jersey and found another intriguing minority language in use, less than 20 km from the French coast.
Jersey is one of the Channel Islands, a dependency of England but sufficiently removed to have become an off-shore tax haven for wealthy Britons ever since the end of World War I. The islands have a long history of smuggling and piracy--Elizabeth College on neighbouring Guernsey was founded by the first Elizabeth when she tired of the piracy, sent a gunboat and built a school to give the locals something better to do. (It worked--several centuries later my two sons boarded there and neither has yet become a pirate.)
Our bus driver, on the obligatory tour of the tiny island's coastline (Jersey is just 15 km long and 8 km deep), was born and bred on the island. He reminisced about starting school there, unable to understand the teacher's English or to make himself understood. And, wandering about the streets of the capital St Helier, we could understand the occasional snippets of French in the signs and shop windows, but not a word that was spoken around us.
French is the official language of Jersey and used in its courts, but its use is declining and English is dominant. The spoken language goes back to the Normans--older by far than the 18th century French spoken in Canada, for example. Jersey speakers are proudly adamant that theirs is a language in its own right and not a debased form of French or a patois. Look at a sample of it:
Lé Jèrriais? Tch'est qu'ch'est?
Lé 'Jèrriais' est la vielle langue d'Jèrri. Ch'est ieune des langues d'oïl, auve lé Nouormand, l'Dgèrnésiais, l'Picard, l'Gallo et l'Ouallon, tchi veinnent du Latîn--tout coumme lé Français, l'Italien, lé Portûndgais, lé Catalan et d'aut's langues.
Tchi qui pâle lé Jèrriais aniet? S'lon lé récensement d'2001 y'avait 2,674 pèrsonnes tchi pâlent l'Jèrriais (3.2% d'la populâtion). Achteu dans l's êcoles, j'avons dans les 200 mousses dans les clâsses du Jèrriais.
If you can read some French you may be able to decode it as written, although aniet=aujourd'hui=today, achteu=actuellement=now and mousse=child might make you pause (mousse in modern French means 'cabin-boy' or 'moss' or 'froth', to say nothing of 'whipped cream' or mousse au chocolat!); but spoken quickly Jèrriais is totally baffling. Note that when they have no word in their vocabulary for a new concept (that's 'new' since the 11th century!) they use the modern French, as in récensement for survey. But 'FAQ' on their website comes out as Tchestchions tréjous d'mandée and 'Return to home page' is R'tou à la page d'siez-mé!
Those paragraphs above translate roughly as:
The Jersey language? What is it?
'Jèrriais' is the old language of Jersey. It is one of the languages from northern France, along with Norman, Guernsey, Picard, Gallic French and Walloon, all coming from the Latin--just like French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and other languages.
Who speaks Jèrriais today? A survey in 2001 showed that 2674 still speak it (3.2% of the population). There are currently about 200 children in Jèrriais classes.
A couple of thousand speakers, only 3% of Jersey's population of around 87,000, clearly make this vestigial Norman French a terminally endangered language. Its present situation is very different from a thousand years ago, when William the Conqueror took England under his stern control--Norman French then became the only effective language in England and written English virtually disappeared until the 13th century.
How are the neighbours doing? In nearby Britanny, with a population of 4 million, up to 300,000 claim that they still speak Breton (a Celtic language) and a further 200,000 have some knowledge of it. But most of the Breton speakers are elderly and they all speak French. If the young people don't speak Breton in the street it will continue its decline at the rate of around 15,000 native speakers a year.
Other members of the Celtic language family also face extinction. David Crystal has looked at their current situation and finds doom and gloom for all except Irish Gaelic, where strong nationalism and its presence in the school curriculum since 1922 have ensured its survival. Welsh and Scottish Gaelic still have native speakers, but their numbers are dwindling. Cornish survives only as a curiosity, maintained on life support by a few associations of enthusiasts.
This is part of a more general trend for minority languages to disappear, taken over ('colonised') by dominant languages like English, Spanish or French. Closer to home, of the 260 interrelated Australian aboriginal languages existing in Cook's day, the great majority are now extinct or nearing extinction, in most cases with only a few hundred native speakers of each surviving language. The same is true for tribal languages in South America and in Papua New Guinea.
Does it really matter if these languages are no longer spoken? We talk of Latin and Greek as 'dead languages', but both have a vast corpus of superb literature that is still read and enjoyed, and in this sense they are not dead at all. The Anglo-Norman Wace, born in Jersey around 1100 and died in Bayeux some time after 1174, is revered on Jersey as the founder of Jèrriais literature. He wrote two verse chronicles, Roman de Brut or Geste des Bretons in 15,000 short couplets (1155) and Roman de Rou or Geste des Normands (1160-74), besides three devotional works. But I have failed to turn up any references to other Jèrriais literature, and Wace single-handed may not be enough to ensure immortality for the language.
This is in spite of the fact that Radio Jersey, a unit of the BBC, broadcasts lessons and programs in Jèrriais, and the Société Jersiaise publishes dictionaries and cassettes and a mass of promotional and educational material. Once it is no longer 'spoken in the streets' Jèrriais will probably pass into gradual oblivion like those others, known henceforth only to a handful of scholars and some rather odd enthusiasts like your editor.
Peter Judge
Sources: The website of the Société Jersiaise at <www.societe-jersiaise.org/geraint/jerriais.html>. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, David Crystal, CUP 1987. Article 'Bretons speak up to save their dying language' by Colin Randall in the Daily Telegraph, 3 Sept 2005.
Our Training Coordinator, Shirley Dyson, has urged all members to review their training needs, with an eye to possible advantage when it comes time for accreditation.
So far this year we have had half-day courses on 'Working with designers and printers' and 'Copyediting' (and a chance to join the indexers in their introductory and intermediate sessions). Ed•Ex is coming up again next year on 3 June, with the chance to be really ambitious in our programming.
What would you like your society to offer in the way of useful training--training that will not only help you to be a better and more professinal editor but also convince your clients that you are right up to the mark? There is a strong potential marketing element in all continuing professional development activity. Make sure that you are exploiting this element to the full.
Contact Shirley with your ideas or requests 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 November and the copy deadline for this issue is 28 October.
The editor welcomes contributions using Word for Windows, by email to peter.judge@alianet.alia.org.au
If by snail mail, then send them on a floppy disk or CD-ROM to Peter Judge at 10 Glyde Place, Kambah ACT 2902. If mailing, always provide a printout as well.
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