From the president
by Elizabeth Spiegel
Earlier this year, your committee had a busy program of events planned – a talk in March, a visit to a printer in April, a copyediting workshop in May.
Then COVID-19 hit, and we (like everyone else) were thrown into disarray. I hope that some of you have been able to take advantage of other branches’ speaker meetings via Zoom. We will be organising some of these ourselves in the coming weeks.
Planning for next year’s conference is still under way: we will be announcing keynote speakers soon.
In uncertain times, we support each other.
Stay well and connected.
Elizabeth
Who is an editor?
For the last 15 years of my public service career, I worked in a team responsible for publishing content to a large public website. My job involved (among other things):
- writing content
- finding other people to write content
- re-writing content to make it easier to read online
- arranging for technical and other clearances
- checking content for spelling, grammar and adherence to departmental style
- reading feedback to identify deficiencies in our content and taking action to correct them.
Looking at IPEd’s Australian standards for editing practice, you will recognise that many of these are editing jobs. And yet my job title was ‘Publishing officer’ or ‘Publishing coordinator’ or ‘Publishing manager’: never ‘Editor’. It was only when I joined what was then the Society of Editors (Tas) Inc. and attended the 2007 conference that I realised how much of what I did every day was editing.
Other editors in the government and corporate worlds have job titles as uninformative as mine were. They may be communications managers or content developers, marketing consultants or webmasters. They may publish content for the general public or for in-house consumption. But people who spend their days – or a substantial part of them – doing tasks similar to those I have listed above may reasonably be described as editors.
How do we let them know that they are members of our profession?
On the other hand, we are all aware of people offering editing services who have neither training nor formal experience. Some of them are indeed competent, having acquired their skills through informal means; some are not.
How do we let them know that the editing profession has standards?