Revising the Australian Standards for Editing Practice

Meeting: Wednesday 26 October 2011
Emeritus Faculty, Building 3T, Fellows Lane Cottage, The Australian National University
6.30 pm, networking and nibbles from 6.00 pm
>> Find the Emeritus Faculty using Google maps

Canberra editors have the chance to review the proposed changes to the Australian Standards for Editing Practice at the October meeting. We will be emailing the proposed Standards to all members before the meeting. If you want to compare versions, you can download a copy of the current Standards at http://iped-editors.org/Editing_standards.

We will be going through the proposed Standards and the original ones with the aim of getting your ideas. Do you agree with what is suggested, or do you have other suggestions to improve the document?

Collectively, Australian editors have reviewed the standards twice – in 2005 and 2010 – and it is time to finalise the revised document. A review need not conclude that a document must change; however, working groups have identified areas that could benefit from some change.

The two prime areas of focus have been:

• active wording that provides skills-based as well as knowledge-based standards
• inclusion of new technologies in terms of editing tools as well as publishing processes and formats.

Other aspects to consider include the overall structure of the document, inconsistencies, and duplication or omission of some points.

We’ll be emailing the proposed version in the next few days so you can have a read and get some thoughts together before the meeting. If you can bring your copy of the original standards, it will help discussions. Page x lists the contents of the two documents to give you a quick overview of where the main changes are.

If you are new to the society, then this is a good chance to find out more about the Standards and how they relate to editing practice in Australia.

We would like to thank our very own Ted Briggs for the work he has done on behalf of IPEd and the societies of editors to get the revision to this stage.