Accreditation exam workshop series
Griffith Community Centre (workshops)
Cost: $200 for each full-day workshop, or $300 for both (includes morning, afternoon tea and lunch)
About the course
The IPEd exam will be on Saturday 19 May 2018. It’s time to start preparing if there is even a slight chance you will sit. It’s a tough exam, so we have packaged two workshops for you and a panel discussion at the general meeting in March (presenters in brackets).
- Copyediting for accreditation on Friday 16 March (Cathy Nicoll AE)
- Grammar in a nutshell on Saturday 17 March (Elizabeth Manning Murphy DE)
- Exam preparation panel presentation on Wednesday evening, 28 March (led by Dr Malini Devadas AE).
All three have been run before, in one form or another, but never as a series.
Bring your fully charged laptop (PC or Mac – not tablet) to the copyediting and grammar workshops so you can practise your onscreen editing skills.
Miracles take more than one or two days! But if you need a refresher or a jump start, then this is it.
The cost will be $300 for the copyediting and grammar workshops combined, or $200 to attend just one. The exam preparation panel presentation will be free because it will be the subject of the general meeting in March.
Copyediting
Cathy Nicoll AE will take you through the basics of copyediting, including the levels of editing, an introduction to the art of completing a style sheet, and how to track changes, suggest changes and provide useful comments to authors. There’s bound to be some solid discussion of many aspects of editing that crop up as questions from editors and prospective editors. Read more
Register for the Copyediting workshop now
Grammar
This is Elizabeth Manning Murphy’s Grammar in a Nutshell, with a focus on exam preparation in the afternoon. 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: parts of speech, sentence structure, paragraphs, whole documents and an introduction to plain English and explaining edits to your clients. Read more
Register for the Grammar workshop now
The exam preparation panel discussion
Dr Malini Devadas AE will lead a panel discussion in March’s general meeting and take you through your final steps towards exam readiness. The panel will cover the IPEd exam strategy, what to expect on the day, assessors’ insights, and an overview of some helpful study resources.
You do not need to register for this event. Everyone is welcome to attend the March general meeting free of charge.
Copyediting workshop
This full-day workshop aims to help you prepare for Part 2 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 Part 3 will also be covered. Don’t forget to bring your laptop so you can take full advantage of the opportunity. You can work on also paper.
The topics cover the areas that examiners tell us people have the most trouble:
- Keeping to a copyedit: how much and how little you can 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 Part 2 style sheet to help your editing and your exam technique.
- Using tracked changes and comments effectively and efficiently (and how to help authors understand what they need to do to fix a problem).
- Tricky copyediting editing topics: lists, tables, captions and more. These often come up in Part 3 of the exam, so we’ll spend some time going through the basics so we can help you prepare.
Cathy Nicoll (B Nat Res (Hons), Grad Dip Ed, TESOL Cert IV) AE is 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
Register for the Copyediting workshop now
Grammar workshop
This Grammar in a nutshell workshop includes activities to help you prepare for the IPEd Accreditation exam but is useful to everyone, whether exam candidate or not. Some activities imitate Part 1 (grammar) and Part 3 of the exam. Don’t forget to bring your laptop so you can work onscreen under timed conditions for immediate feedback and an opportunity to analyse your exam strategies. You can do these activities on paper if you prefer.
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. The day will work through some common grammatical problems. Your workbook will become a useful reference book. We will also recommend further reading.
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.
There will be activities all day and we can email more to you that you can do at home on your computer and return for feedback. A free private email consultation is included.
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. Copies will be available at a discount price of $30 (cash or EFT).
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 the CSE. Elizabeth will be assisted by Jon Rosalky PhD GradDipEcon, a scientist, language enthusiast, IT specialist and member of the Canberra Society of Editors.
Register for the Grammar workshop now