From the committee
by Susie Pilkington and Julie Ganner
We did manage to meet in person last month (March 10), but this may have been the last time for a while. Our discussions certainly (and urgently) included options for remote access for both speaker presentations and committee meetings, given the current situation with COVID-19. We are now working on putting these plans into action, so we can maintain our professional development program as far as possible during this difficult time. We hope as many members as possible will support this initiative, in order to keep the program running. Please keep an eye out for updates in the coming weeks.
March also brought a variety of other changes to our systems and processes:
- The Committee was pleased to formally welcome a new member, Sara Kitaoji. Sara will take on social media for the branch and will be part of the team presenting our speaker meetings on Zoom when we launch the platform.
- At our speaker meetings, the option of attending online via Zoom will soon be available for those presenters who agree to be on camera. The presentation will also continue to be written up in the newsletter for all of our meetings, regardless of how they are offered.
- The newsletter is undergoing changes too. You are reading this in the first IPEd-wide newsletter, with material filed by all IPEd branches.
- To introduce the ‘locals’ to each other, we have started group lists of our regional members around the state, similar to the northern New South Wales group which regularly meets for editors’ lunches. We now have around six regional groups that we will put in touch with each other to coordinate lunches or other informal networking events. We shall, of course, whenever possible, publicise these gatherings to all members, so that anyone who happens to be travelling in the region can join in.
- The branch continues to be on budget, thanks to continued vigilance and the expert guidance of budget officer, Russell Noakes. This is one of the ‘nuts and bolts’ issues we discuss each month because, as a branch of IPEd, it is important that we keep an eye on our own bottom line, to ensure the ongoing financial success of the organisation as a whole.
- And we are starting to plan the Editors NSW biennial seminar, to be held on Saturday, 14 November, all being well by then. Please hold the date. Our tentative theme for the day is ‘Looking after the editor’ – a theme we devised long before the current health situation arose but which will, of course, be more relevant than ever this year. We will call for suggestions for topics and speakers shortly. If you have an idea you think we should develop, please send it to ednsw.profdev@iped-editors.org.
Editors NSW 2019–20 committee
President: Julie Ganner
Vice-president: Robert Rowe
Secretary: Sally Asnicar
Budget officer: Russell Noakes
Meetings coordinator: Caroline Hunter
Professional development coordinator: Robert Rowe
Member liaison officer: Katrina Gibson
Social media coordinator: Sara Kitaoji
Newsletter editor: Elisabeth Thomas
Website coordinator: Christopher Cowan
IPEd board member (NSW): Russell Noakes
Accreditation Board delegate (NSW): Linda Nix
Mentoring program delegate: Shannon Kelly
Office manager: Susie Pilkington
Events
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, when possible member meetings will be held via videoconference using the Zoom application.
Members are urged to check their email for the latest information on any event.
Member meetings
Topic: Health and medical writing and editing: opportunities and pitfalls
Date: Tuesday 7 April 2020, 7pm AEST
Location: Videoconference via Zoom
Presenter: Mark Ragg draws on earlier careers in medicine (emergency departments) and journalism (Sydney Morning Herald) to inform his work writing, editing, researching and consulting. He is an Adjunct Fellow in Indigenous Health in the Graduate School of Health at UTS, an editor with Croakey, and sits on the Human Research Ethics Committee of the Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Network.
Details: Mark Ragg will speak about the skills and attributes needed, and opportunities for work, the benefits and perils of specialisation and the need to constantly look ahead.
He started his working life as a doctor, moved to journalism, then added health and medical editing. He has worked on information for the public and for professionals, for print and online, with government, academia and NGOs. He has learned along the way about extensions to his core skills – research, publishing, consultancy.
Cost: $10 members, $15 non-members, no concessions for this event.
Bookings via the IPEd Events page
Bookings close Saturday 4 April and attendees will be sent a link for Zoom on Sunday 5 April.
Topic: News – good, bad, fake? What corpora can tell us about language usage
Date: Tuesday 5 May 2020, 7pm AEST
Location: Videoconference via Zoom
Presenter: Claudia Koch-McQuillan is a translator, interpreter and former university lecturer and tutor in translation studies and technologies. She finds language fascinating and enjoys corpora as tools that give unique insights into our practical use of language and can provide solutions to otherwise intractable language problems.
Details: Corpora – large collections of language as it is used, marked up to support a wide range of searches – are a relatively recent addition to the toolbox of anybody working with language. This talk will show how corpora can be used to check collocations, linguistic variations and concordances as well as to quickly and easily extract specialist terminology from a text or collection of texts to build up technical vocabulary. Corpora are a very useful addition to any language toolbox, and the resources used in this talk are freely available online.
Bookings via the IPEd Events page
Bookings close Saturday 2 May and attendees will be sent a link for Zoom on Sunday 3 May.
Topic: Sensitivity readers (to be confirmed)
Date: Tuesday 2 June 2020, 7pm AEST
Location: Videoconference via Zoom
Presenter: Radhiah Chowdhury
Workshop
Topic: Preparing for the accreditation exam (to be confirmed)
Date: Tuesday 19 May 2020
Details: This one-day workshop is designed for people intending to sit the IPEd Accreditation Exam or contemplating doing it in the future. Even if you do not plan on sitting the exam, you will find that the practice exercises are relevant to everyday editing.
Presenter: James Bean AE writes and edits in the field of English Language Teaching and has created materials for publishers around the world including Shanghai Educational Publishing House, Cambridge University Press, Seibido (Japan) and International Language Teaching Services (UK). He is the editor of Hueber Lektüren, an award-winning series of graded YA fiction for German publisher Heuber Verlag. His writing work ranges from abridged classics to the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) preparation resources. James sat the IPEd accreditation exam in 2011.
Because of social distancing restrictions, this workshop cannot be run in person, as originally planned. We are currently exploring whether it is feasible to deliver this workshop online and will provide an update on this as soon as we can.