StetPet Editorial Assistants
The Northwest Editors Guild introduced a weekly feature called StetPet on our social media during the summer of 2017 to give our followers a midweek smile. We’ve posted photos and descriptions of animal editorial and writing assistants from all over the world every Wednesday since, featuring plenty of cats, dogs, rodents, aquatic pets, and even wild animal visitors that “help” editors and authors with their work. StetPet posts are frequently the most popular posts on the Guild’s social media feeds.
Building Relationships: A Post-Conference Conversation
To all the editors who participated in the Northwest Editors Guild’s Red Pencil Conference 2019 in September, we’d like to say once more—thank you for joining us! It was a day full of new perspectives, new ideas, new skills, and new voices. It was also a day for celebrating editors and our commitment to creating bridges between writers and readers.
We would also like to thank once again the many supporters who stepped up to make the Guild’s first scholarship program a reality this year. Six Voice & Voices scholarships were awarded to encourage six editors to attend their first Red Pencil Conference. We hope they will continue to add their voices to our growing editorial community.
English as We Have Loved It
When Amy Einsohn’s classic Copyeditor’s Handbook was first published in 2000, at least 50 percent of copyeditors in the book industry (a sector of publishing rarely ahead of the technology curve) were still marking paper manuscripts with No. 2 pencils, according to panelists at a conference for on-screen editing held in San Francisco that year. Many deft amateurs still learned their craft, as Amy and I had, by apprenticing to a battle-tested in-house editor or by following hand-marked foul copy while proofreading typeset galleys. Publishers, the traditional gatekeepers of content, still typically anointed lucky authors for fifteen minutes of fame, although spurned writers sometimes resorted to the widely disparaged practice of “vanity publishing” by digging into their own pockets. Some of us editors even had “real jobs”—the kind with regular paychecks and benefits. (Secure in my niche as managing editor at the University of California Press, I was among the fortunate ones.)
The culture and practice of editing have profoundly changed since then.
A Long-time Guild Member’s First ACES Conference
This year I joined ACES: The Society for Editing just in time for their annual conference in Providence, RI, on March 27-30, 2019. I pictured the trip as a pilgrimage to the New England of my youth, complete with grime on the streets, weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk, a vague smell of fish . . . Nope, nuttin’ like that.
Instead, it was about putting faces to institutions, such as Peter Sokolowski to Merriam-Webster or Helen Eby to the new Spanish Editors Association. Experiencing the buzz around AP style, particularly this year’s “gasp moment”: cutting hyphens from common constructions like “third grade teacher.” (I am sure glad most of my own clients prefer Chicago style!) The event was also about finding one’s place in the world of editors and freelancing. I definitely had the feeling of being among my people! Both Boston and Providence have seen major renovation since I lived there. A bonus: delicious food.
Giant Pencil Interviews Mary Norris, the Comma Queen
Our own mascot, Giant Pencil, met up with author and copy editor extraordinaire Mary Norris at the ACES 2019 conference in Providence, RI, to chat about her latest book, Greek to Me.
Collaboration and Relaxation at the Oregon and SW Washington Editors Retreat
In early 2018, fellow Portland editor and Guild member Julie Swearingen and I took over planning of the happy hours for the Portland contingent of the Northwest Editors Guild, hoping to bring our local editors together and continue to provide them with a space for communication and collaboration. We’ve enjoyed the relationships and connections this experience has forged for us. When a conversation with former Guild president Pm Weizenbaum sparked the idea for an editors retreat, we were eager to help create a learning-based experience that would build upon the happy hours we’d started hosting.
So, during the last weekend of September 2018, twelve editors gathered in small Rockaway Beach, Oregon, for the first ever Oregon and SW Washington Editors Retreat.
Unique Holiday Gifts for Editors
What kind of holiday gifts would a discerning editor enjoy? How about the editor who seems rigid but has a secret sense of humor? The basic go-to coffee shop gift cards and sets of red pens are appreciated, but you can do better than that for your closest edibuddies and word nerds.
Below is a list of unique and memorable gifts—arranged alphabetically by store name—suitable for just about every age, size, flavor, and type of editor, plus the tiniest editors-to-be. You might even find something you’ll want to treat yourself to after making that big deadline!
What We Learned at ACES 2018
Approximately a dozen Editors Guild members convened in Chicago with more than 700 other editors during the ACES 2018 conference April 26–28. ACES: The Society for Editing (formerly known as the American Copy Editors Society), a national organization for professional editors, hosts its annual three-day conference in a different U.S. city each spring.
The ACES conference is often the venue where the major style guides and dictionaries announce upcoming changes in spelling, style, and usage. It is especially well known as the conference where each year the Associated Press announces updates to its Stylebook in a room full of gasping and cheering editors. (The 2016 lowercasing of the word “internet” brought a mix of applause and disgusted harrumphs, while this year’s comparatively tame removal of the hyphen in “3D” didn’t cause nearly as many emotional reactions.)
Thinking Hard for Ourselves: A Short History of Editors
Chapter five of Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit, a book on the craft of self-editing*, is dedicated to the (mainly western and Eurocentric, it must be said) history of editing. She traces the editor’s genealogy through the following positions.
She originates editing with scribes, who, in ancient Mesopotamia, “had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer” with their powers to understand and shape the written word. Later, in medieval Europe, “the sleepy scribe would accidentally skip or alter words; the arrogant yet lucid would rewrite an obtuse passage; the zealous would interpolate” (and sometimes a feline coworker would contribute their own take on a manuscript).