Next meeting
Wednesday 28 May
Being both author &
editor: an experience in
juggling two roles
O ur speaker, historian Ian
Howie-Willis OAM, will
talk about his experiences on
both sides of the author–editor
relationship.
Born in Melbourne, Ian learnt
the craft of writing as a cadet
journalist on the Melbourne
Sun. But tiring of night shifts, he
embarked on a career as a teacher
and historian, which took him
via Papua New Guinea and the
University of Kent to the ANU
in 1975. Seven years teaching
Sociology at Dickson College
followed. During that time he
was commissioned to write
the centenary history of the St
John Ambulance organisation in
Australia.
Long years as a public servant
in the ACT Department of
Education and Training followed,
punctuated by several self-edited
books. In 1990 he was Senior
Editor and principal writer of
The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal
Australia. He also spent three
years as the Managing Editor of
the journal, Aboriginal History.
His latest book, Surgeon and
General: A Life of Major-General
Rupert Downes, 1885–1945, will
be released in September.
As usual, we will meet in the
Friends Lounge of the National
Library of Australia, at 6.00 for
6.30 pm.
Canberra Society of Editors Newsletter
Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
April meeting report
An evening with Anita Heiss
D
r Anita
Heiss
shared
with us her
experiences
and views on
editing and
collaborating
on Aboriginal
work. While the topic is serious and
totally relevant to our profession
Anita presented the topic in the most
entertaining manner which had us
in fits of laughter several times that
evening. She is indeed a refined
raconteur.
Early in her presentation Anita
suggested that for all Australians to
better understand our Indigenous
compatriots it would be useful
to include at least one unit on
Indigenous studies in every
university degree course.
Anita alerted us to protocols for
working with Indigenous writers,
communities and cultural material,
covering:
• respect
• Indigenous control
• communication,
• consultation and consent
• interpretation, integrity and
authenticity
• secrecy and confidentiality
• attribution and copyright
• proper return
• continuing cultures
• recognition and protection.
Anita based her remarks
on the work of Terri Janke and
Robynne Quiggin (Aust Council)
and referred us to the discussion
paper Writing about Indigenous
Australia—some issues to consider
and protocols to follow available at
<www.asauthors.org>.
Indigenous authors have
identified a number of issues
which editors need to consider in
approaching works by Indigenous
people:
• Editing of ‘Aboriginal English’
does not mean translating it into
mainstream Australian or any
other English.
• There is a serious danger that
editors unfamiliar with working
with Indigenous authors will
draw plots and themes towards
non-Indigenous concepts of
story telling.
• Editors need to be aware that
some of the material they edit
could be sensitive even if
doesn’t appear so.
• Editors need to be aware of their
lack of knowledge in the area,
topic or people covered in the
work they edit.
Anita illustrated these issues with
her own editorial experiences with
Aboriginal Studies Press in 2003
and ABC Books and Random House
in 2007. Among other incidents, she
recalled how for the cover of the
(Continued on page 5)
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
Canberra Society of
Editors Inc.
ABN 77 022 481 553
www.editorscanberra.org
PO Box 3222
Manuka ACT 2603
Committee members 2007–08
President
Ted Briggs
6161 4924; 0407 018 433
tedbriggs@grapevine.com.au
Vice-President
Ann Parkinson
6282 1993
Ann.Parkinson@atrax.net.au
Immediate past President
Virginia Wilton
6273 3048 (w)
virginia@whh.com.au
Secretary
Alan Roberts
6251 2172
alan.roberts@velocitynet.com.au
Treasurer
Margaret Millard
6288 6754 (h); 0402 029 552
margaret.millard@ozemail.com.au
Web minder, membership files
Peter Judge
6296 6211 (w/h/fax)
peter.judge@bigpond.com
Membership Secretary
Gil Garcon
6216 6572 or 04 1470 1470
gil.garcon@ato.gov.au
Public Officer
Helen Topor
6207 3414 (w)
helen.topor@afp.com.au
Training coordinator
Kerie Newell
6121 3470; 0412 042 974
kerie.newell@dewr.gov.au
General meeting coordinator
Janet Salisbury
6282 2280; 0416 167 280
janet@biotext.com.au
Catering coordinators
Dallas Stow and Damaris Wilson
6247 3111 (h)
wilsondidi@aol.com
IPEd delegate
Virginia Wilton
6273 3048 (w)
virginia@whh.com.au
IPEd Accreditation Board
Larissa Joseph
6161 5216
larissa.joseph@gmail.com
Chris Pirie
6282 3730
cpirie@netspeed.com.au
Page 2
IPEd Notes
News from the Institute of Professional Editors
www.iped-editors.org
May 2008
T
he inaugural meeting of
the IPEd Council, held in
Canberra in mid-April,
appointed Virginia Wilton of the
Canberra society as chair and Janice
Bird of Tasmania as honorary
treasurer until the annual general
meeting later in 2008. Following
consideration of a duty statement
for the paid part-time position of
secretary, Ed Highley, who has
done a wonderful job as unpaid
secretary since 2005, was appointed
temporarily; the position will be
advertised before the annual general
meeting.
Each councillor has taken
responsibility for a particular
area: budget, finance and risk
management, Virginia Wilton, Ed
Highley and Janice Bird; website,
communication and PR, Rosemary
Luke; professional development
and standards, Anne Surma and
Robin Bennett, who is also on
the Accreditation Board; policy
development, Rosemary Noble;
dispute resolution and governance,
Michael Lewis, who is also Council
representative on the Accreditation
Board. Councillors will prepare
issues papers on their respective
areas for discussion at their next
meeting in Adelaide at the end of
May.
Conscious of their responsibilities
under the Corporations Law, the
councillors devoted a lot of time
to IPEd’s finances. They have set
the annual levy for 2008–09 at $20
per society member, and agreed
on policy and procedures for the
costs of meetings. The Council
will obtain advice on budgeting,
taxation (particularly GST) and
other financial matters from an
New members
Welcome to new members who have joined us recently:
Kevin Maguire (associate); Wendy Elliott, Carmen Kovac, Jack Bowers
and Nicholas Craven (full); Shirley Byrne, Barbara Coe and Sharon
Eacott (upgrading from associate).
accountant with experience in not-
for-profit organisations, and seek
appropriate suppliers of banking
and insurance by the end of May.
The Council commended
the Accreditation Board on its
remarkable progress in developing
the accreditation scheme, particularly
in managing the intense activity since
the end of 2007. Councillors, having
studied the board’s budget, were
concerned at the likely significant
shortfall between revenue and costs
for the first exam. They have begun
work on a rigorous, revised budget
and a broader business model for
accreditation so that the examination
can be offered at an acceptable fee
without jeopardising IPEd’s overall
objectives and operations. As a
result, the Council has reluctantly
decided to postpone the first exam
until later in 2008. It maintains the
commitment to provide members
with four months’ notice of the date
of the exam.
The Accreditation Board and the
Assessors Forum have continued
to hold teleconferences to discuss
preparations for the exam. The
board has appointed a team of highly
experienced editors to develop the
exam paper, with Meryl Potter as
lead writer and Janet Salisbury,
Shelley Kenigsberg and Stephanie
Holt as reviewers. Alan Ernst as
exam coordinator will oversee
the conduct of the exam. The first
priority is to revise the sample exam
and post it on the website so that
candidates will know exactly what
to expect.
Janet Mackenzie
Liaison Officer

From the President
W
hat a great meeting we had in April. Not
only was it entertaining but it also raised
some important issues that many Australian
editors will face. For those who missed out, Gil Garcon
has written a fairly comprehensive report on Dr Heiss’s
talk and I encourage you to check out the resources she
pointed us to.
On a slightly sad note, I’m sorry to announce
that Peter Judge has resigned from the position of
newsletter editor. I’d like to thank Peter for his untiring
work over the last few years in producing such a
professional newsletter. The newsletter and the web
site are extremely important as they are the public face
of our society. I’d particularly like to thank Peter for
his patience in coping with my considerable flexibility
in meeting deadlines! Fortunately Peter is not handing
over the other critical roles he performs—looking
after our website and maintaining the membership
database.
However, this represents a terrific opportunity for
one or more of our members to get more involved in the
society as our new newsletter editor (see advertisement
on the back page).
Joe Massingham will be conducting focus groups
with some of our members over the next week, and he
expects to have his report to us shortly thereafter. I’m
And yes, there’s more
This is the final instalment of the item about the IPEd
trial exam which Gil Garcon drafted earlier this
year and which appeared over the last two issues.
A
n issue yet to be resolved is the accreditation
of existing editors who have academic
editing qualifications from official tertiary
institutions. Where do these editors stand? Should
they be automatically accredited? Should they
provide evidence of work like the others? Do tertiary
qualifications mean nothing without the IPEd seal of
approval? Where does it stop?
Let’s also keep in mind that accreditation will not
always be needed nor useful, and might help only
a few. Those of us who apply for editing positions
in federal and state public services, and apparently
increasingly in business, are assessed on the now
widespread integrated leadership system. Concrete
evidence is what is required there, and accreditation
from IPEd, as nice as it might be, will contribute little
if anything to the selection process. As things stand,
it would appear that a large number of professional
editors in those entities are not members of the
societies which make up IPEd, and IPEd accreditation
will mean nothing to them and these employers, with
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
looking forward to this since
I’m confident it will really
help us improve our ability to
meet members’ needs.
In setting up this exercise,
as well in various other
activities we’ve conducted
recently, a word has
emerged describing one of
the characteristics of our
members. That word is ‘self-effacing’. We seem to be
a really shy bunch, reluctant to put ourselves forward.
Maybe this is because of the nature of the work we do,
the fact that many of us work in relative isolation, or the
personality type of people who are attracted to editing.
In any case, no-one should feel shy about putting
themselves forward to help in any way no matter how
small—in fact this is the only way the society can
function. So I urge you all to get involved and volunteer
to pitch in to help out wherever you possibly can, even
if it’s in a very small way. Every bit counts!
We have another interesting meeting lined up on the
28th. I look forward to seeing you all there.
Ted Briggs
or without a publicity campaign.
Some applicants might find the costs of
accreditation high for a result of uncertain value. It
could be an expensive gamble. Then there will the cost
of the publicity campaign for which we all, Canberra
Society of Editors members, will foot the bill, whether
accredited or not.
Accreditation seemed a good idea fifteen years ago.
The increasing number of editors who avail themselves
of the new tertiary courses now offered make it less
compelling. I suggest that within another 15 to 20
years, most editors will have a formal editing degree.
What then would be the use of accreditation? The cynic
in me prompts: ‘To show that you’re a nice member of
the club? To provide closed-shop workplaces?’
The exploratory effort put in by our fellow editors
towards accreditation has not been in vain. It had to
be done. They deserve our respect. Should we proceed
with the exam, there still are key issues to be addressed
before it takes off. In addressing the practicalities of
an exam, let not blind excitement lead us to ignore the
fundamentals.
Gil Garcon
Page 3
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
Grammar’s in style … ‘Apostrophe’s’?
W
hat if I had written
Grammars in style
…? Would that mean
the same thing as Grammar’s in
style?
There are some who would
like to get rid of the apostrophe
altogether, but our language and
the meaning we attach to what
we say and write would suffer.
Grammars in style tells us that
‘style’ has a variety of ‘grammars’ and perhaps that
each one imparts some different meaning to the style in
which we are writing.
On the other hand Grammar’s in style is intended
to mean that grammar is stylish, fashionable, the ‘in’
concept in writing. I hope that’s the meaning you got
from what I intended. It is short for Grammar is in
style—it is a contraction. I believe it too—grammar
is talked about more now than for many years because
a lot of people in Australia, particularly those under
about 45 years old, are realising that they missed out
on learning English grammar at school. If they learned
another language at school, they probably learned the
grammar of that language. If they were very lucky, they
realised then that their own language must also have
a grammar. And if they were extremely lucky indeed,
they managed to learn some English grammar, either by
consulting their parents or by studying it on their own.
Those schoolchildren are now in middle management
and even more senior administrative positions, having
to write reports and all manner of documents at work,
and perhaps wanting to learn another language where
the teacher expects a working knowledge of aspects
of English grammar. They are seeking training in
basic English grammar; they are talking about it; they
have made the word ‘grammar’ fashionable—yes,
Grammar’s in style.
Last month I wrote about Apostrophes. So what’s
Apostrophe’s? It could be a contraction too, as in The
apostrophe’s a little squiggle. But more commonly it is
a mistake, as in the list of specials at the greengrocery:
onion’s
potatoe’s
Brussel’s sprout’s
Little wonder that this kind of usage is known as the
grocer’s apostrophe! The writer is under the impression
that the apostrophe has to be used to indicate plural.
This is not true, except in a very few instances. If there
is more than one TAFE college in a town, we write
There are three TAFEs in this town, not ‘TAFE’s’.
The example Brussel’s sprout’s above is wrong on two
counts—first, the apostrophes are not needed because
there is no possession intended and, if there were, it
would have to be Brussels’ or Brussels’s because the
name of the city is Brussels, not Brussel; and second,
it is not necessary to put an apostrophe in sprouts to
Page 4
make it plural.
Exceptions to this rule are rare, but here are three:
Dot your i’s and cross your t’s, Mind your p’s and q’s,
and There are four s’s in Mississippi. The apostrophe
is used in these sentences because they would be
confusing to read without them.
What about pronouns? Personal pronouns have
a case system, a relic of Old English and Latin. In
English we do have all the cases that were in Latin:
nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative,
ablative. We just don’t have different endings on
words to indicate those cases. In English we depend
on word order to understand the case of nouns: Paul
loves Mary is not the same as Mary loves Paul. In
Latin we could write Paulus amat Mariam, Mariam
amat Paulus, or Mariam Paulus amat, and they would
all mean exactly the same: Paul loves Mary, because
the endings on the nouns tells us that Paul is the subject
(nominative case) and Mariam is the object (accusative
case), no matter what order the words appear in. The
genitive (possessive) case is seen in English in personal
pronouns only:
my, mine
your, yours
his/her, his/hers, its
our, ours
your, yours
their, theirs
Not an apostrophe in sight! Remember its means
‘belonging to it’ whereas it’s is a contraction and
means ‘it is’ or ‘it has’. An example: It’s ours! I know it
because of its colours; there’s theirs.
How about a sentence like this: This is Sydney Boys
High School; it is this boy’s school? Why no apostrophe
after Boys but an apostrophe in boy’s? Once upon a
time, there used to be an apostrophe after Boys’. It was
thought that there was ownership involved—that the
boys owned the school. As time has gone on, people
have decided that Boys is really just an adjective
modifying High School, so they have now removed the
apostrophe. However, the apostrophe remains in boy’s
because this time there is ownership intended—the
school of this boy.
The apostrophe is often over-used in writing. In
formal writing, such as business letters (including
emails), reports, business manuals and so on, it is best
to avoid contractions such as can’t, don’t, I’ve etc.
They may have a place in more informal writing, such
as in the speech of fictional characters in a novel, for
example I didn’t get to the shops, so I haven’t bought
any bread. It is never a good idea to have more than
one apostrophe in a word—multiple contractions such
as wouldn’t’ve are frowned upon.
Apostrophes sometimes drop right out of words.
Would you ’phone for a ’cab to get you to the ’plane in
(Continued on page 5)

(Grammar’s in style … ‘Apostrophe’s’?,
continued from page 4)
time, or take the ’bus? Neither, I suspect. All these
curtailed words have become commonplace—we
mostly don’t use the words telephone, taxicab,
aeroplane and omnibus; instead we use phone, cab
(or taxi), plane and bus.
’til next time.
© Elizabeth Manning Murphy, 2008
<emmurphy@ozemail.com.au>
(An evening with Anita Heiss, continued from
page 1)
book she wrote with students of La Perouse Public
School Yirra and her deadly dog Demon the illustrator
had used earth-coloured dots, a pattern and style that
many non-Australian Indigenous people associate with
Indigenous people. Such illustration was inappropriate
because that cultural expression and style is limited to
people from central Australia and has nothing to do
with the culture of the largest Indigenous community,
the one in Sydney.
For post-apology collaborations Anita brought to
our attention a code of ethics checklist based on work
by Jackie Huggins and Pat Mamajun Torres. Here are
some salient questions which illustrate the point we
editors need to consider:
• Have you capitalised ‘Aborigine’, ‘Aboriginal’
and ‘Indigenous’?
• Have you used ‘Aborigines’, ‘Indigenous’ or
‘First Nations’ instead of ‘natives’ or ‘primitive
peoples’?
• Have you avoided the use of negative and racist
terms?
• Have you used ‘nation’ instead of ‘tribe’ (or ‘clan’
if that is the case – many clans can make up
one nation), ‘elder’ instead of ‘chief’, ‘children’
instead of ‘piccaninnies’?
• Instead of using the word ‘walkabout’, which
suggests aimless walking, have you described the
reason for travel?
• If you have used Koori, Murri, Nunga or Nyoongar,
have you used them for the right geographic
region?
• Are you aware that different Aboriginal nations
have their own terms for the ‘dreaming’ or creation
period, such as ‘Alcheringa’ in much of NSW?
Have you used the correct terminology for the area
you are writing about?
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
• If you are recording a creation story, have you got
permission from the owners of that story? Contact
the Local Land Council, Cultural Centre or other
local organisation to do so.
• Have you researched literature, films and audio
material produced by Indigenous people which is
relevant to your topic?
• Is the community you are writing about aware
of your work? Detached observer status is not
advisable. Consult with relevant Aboriginal
organisations and individuals in the establishment
of your project. Keep Aboriginal people informed
and, where possible, provide regular updates.
When the first draft has been completed, take it
back to the community for their approval and to
vet.
• Have you received feedback or comment on your
work from relevant individuals and organisations?
For example, if you are writing about land issues,
you should send drafts to the relevant local land
council.
• Have you acknowledged appropriately the sources
of your information, particularly if they are
individuals and communities?
• Does your material empower the community or
group you write about?
• There is no law against you writing about
Indigenous issues, but is there a reason why you
need to do it? You may well be asked to justify
yourself by those you are writing about. Can you
do that?
Anita’s extraordinary story telling skills continued
over dinner for those who joined her. She left us with
several useful resources and references:
• Protocols for producing Indigenous Australian
writing—Australia Council for the Arts
<www.australiacouncil.gov.au>
• Australian Society of Authors:
<www.asauthors.org>
• Arts Law Centre of Australia (for legal matters)
<www.artslaw.com.au>
• Dhuuluu Yala (talk straight): publishing
Aboriginal literature, Aboriginal Studies Press,
Canberra, 2001
• Terri Janke, Our culture, our future — report on
Australian Indigenous cultural and intellectual
property rights, Michael Frankel & Company for
AIATSIS and ATSIC, 1998 <www.frankfellawyer
s.com.au/media/report/culture.pdf>
• Black Book <www.blackbook.afc.gov.au>
• Black Words: Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander writers and storytellers dataset of
AustLit <www.austlit.edu.au/specialistDatasets/
BlackWords>
Gil Garcon
Page 5
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
Thinking about words: wagging, dotting and dashing about
T
he next IPEd conference will be in Adelaide in
October 2009. It’s so far away over the horizon
that you probably didn’t think to follow up
the reference in our April newsletter to the website
at <www.iped-editors.org/content/conferences>, so
you’ve missed the charming conference logo with the
little people wagging their flags.
In terms of the theme, ‘Getting the message across’,
the logo may not be an unmitigated success! Unless
you were a keen Girl Guide or Boy Scout and got
your Communicator Badge and remember which flags
mean what, the little flag waggers won’t be doing their
stuff for you. The little Guides in the chart spell out
the semaphore alphabet so that you can decode the
message.
With a bit of help, there’s no
problem. But where on earth did
all this come from?
The semaphore’s use on land
goes back to 1791. The inventor
was a Frenchman, Claude
Chappe, so you might expect
that the word has French origins
and indeed ‘sémaphore’ enters
the French language in 1812,
defined as ‘a kind of telegraph’.
But Chappe’s system went far
beyond little flags. He used a set
of giant wooden arms worked
by levers at the top of a tower.
Towers were built on hilltops
within sight of each other, up
to 10 kilometres or so apart; the
message was read by telescope and repeated to the
next tower. An experienced operator could send at
the rate of three symbols a minute, not very fast, but
when the alternative was a messenger on horseback it
seemed a great leap forward. Initially they were set up
along the coast to give ships at sea information about
tides or the weather. But they very soon spread far and
wide—for example, the news of Napoleon’s defeat
of the Prussians at Jena in 1806 reached Paris in 24
hours, then tremendously fast for a distance of about a
thousand kilometres.
Just what does semaphore mean? The sema- part is
from the Greek word for a sign or signal, and the -phore
from the Greek for ‘carrying’. The word first turns up
in print in English in 1816, with the news that ‘the
improved semaphore has been erected on top of the
Admiralty’. The system stayed in vogue until well into
the 20th century, mainly used at that time by the world’s
navies (in point of fact, the navy was already using
signal flags or lights by the 16th century). It inevitably
Page 6
became more complicated with
time, nowhere more so than in
Japan, where it was used by the
merchant marine and armed
services. Their writing system
involves a syllabary of about
twice the number of characters
in the Latin alphabet, so that
most characters took two or
three wags to complete.
While we are thinking about
early communication it seems
logical to look at its next development, the electric
telegraph. The inventor here was Samuel Morse, he of
the code. A more surprising pioneer in this field would
be hard to imagine. A clergyman’s son born in 1791,
he completed his education in Yale where he attended
some lectures on the new ‘electricity’. He then went
to work for a publisher, but his real interest lay in art
and his parents supported him to
go to England to study. On his
return to America he became a
portrait painter, increasingly in
demand and eventually painting
‘some of the finest portraits ever
done by an American artist’.
At the age of 40 Morse again
went to Europe for further art
studies, and when returning by
ship in 1832 heard about the
newly discovered electromagnet
and conceived the idea of the
telegraph. He was then earning
his living by teaching art at New
York University, but gave this up
in 1837 to work full-time on his
invention and, of course, on his
code of dots and dashes. It took a
few years to convince Congress
that this was an important development deserving
support, but in 1844 a telegraph line was completed
between Washington and Baltimore and Morse sent the
first message, ‘What God hath wrought!’
The invention brought Morse fame and fortune and
changed the world. The code that he first worked out for
the English language was simplified and expanded by a
European consortium in 1851 to suit other languages,
particularly those requiring letters with diacritic marks,
and to add punctuation and other symbols—over 50
characters, compared with the original 26 letters and
ten numbers. A variety of ‘Morse’ codes has also
been worked out for other alphabets, such as Greek,
Cyrillic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese. But after his
death in 1872 the telegraph was superseded first by the
telephone, then by radio and television. As the memory
of his inventions fades into history, his reputation as a
(Continued on page 7)

(Thinking about words, continued from page 6)
portrait painter continues to grow, a paradox that Morse
would not have appreciated.
All those inventions starting with tele- owe this
prefix to a Greek word meaning ‘far off’, so that
telegraph is writing at a distance, telephone hearing at
a distance and so on. Television comes from a mixed
marriage—the tele- has Greek parents and vision
Latin. This verbal miscegenation is seen as inelegant
by linguistic purists, but to keep it all Greek television
would have to be telescope, a name already taken by
Galileo for another instrument in the early 1600s—we
acquired it from his Italian telescopio. And radio? That
IPEd response to Gil Garcon’s comments
I
have read with great interest Gil Garcon’s thoughts
on accreditation in previous issues of The Canberra
Editor. As the chair of the (now-dissolved)
Accreditation Working Group, I would like to comment
on the points he raises.
I thank Gil for devoting considerable thought to the
matter; indeed, his arguments and conclusions resemble
the course of discussions in the Accreditation Working
Group. The model he suggests is very like the portfolio
assessment that was put forward in 2004. Since then,
feedback from prospective candidates and assessors
has shown that a portfolio is unsuitable for the basic
level of accreditation for several reasons:
• Some prospective candidates have said that they
could not provide evidence of competency such as
marked-up drafts and correspondence for reasons
of confidentiality (both personal and commercial)
and copyright. If authors or employers refuse
permission to use material, some candidates will
be disadvantaged. A few of our members work on
documents that are classified for national security
and could not provide such evidence.
• It is difficult to assess the quality of editing unless
one knows the brief and the constraints that applied
to the job. Thus candidates would have to provide
documentation to support their samples of work,
and the process of gathering all the evidence
and obtaining permission to use it was felt to be
onerous.
• Editorial practice is richly varied. Some prospective
candidates specialise in fields such as biological
sciences, young adult fiction, maths education
or web publications; others work in allied areas
Accreditation and beyond: your career as an editor
The Society’s day of workshops and presentations at Old Parliament House. EdEx 2008 will focus on the
three stages—early, middle and late—of your life as an editor. More information coming soon.
Help still needed on the organising committee. Contact Ted Briggs to volunteer—don’t wait to be asked!
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008
was originally short for radio-telegraphy or radio-
telephony, from the Latin radius meaning a ‘ray’. And
now our Adelaide friends have brought semaphore
onto their website, the oldest with the newest—the
wheel has turned full circle!
Peter Judge
Sources: The Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on
CD-ROM v.3.0. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2007 Ultimate
Reference Suite. Le trésor de la langue française at http://
atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm. The 27 flag-wagging Girl Guides from
<www.winterbourne.freeuk.com/semaphore.gif>.
as instructional designers, technical writers or
publications officers. The assessors would therefore
have to make judgements on portfolios that differ
widely in content and scope.
• The assessors are acutely aware that their decisions
may ultimately affect candidates’ livelihoods
and are determined that their assessments will be
fair, transparent and consistent. Because exam
answers are easier to compare than portfolios the
judgements of different assessors are more likely to
be consistent, especially over a period of years.
• The assessors, as senior professionals, expect
reasonable remuneration for advancing the careers
of other editors. The thorough assessment of a
portfolio – even brief evidence of competencies
such as Gil proposes – could require several hours’
work by each panel member, and the cost of this
would raise the application fee to an unrealistic
level.
• It is expensive to convene a national peer-review
panel. Even if assessors give up their weekends
and charge only for time worked, they must be
reimbursed for airfares, accommodation and
out-of-pocket expenses. Again, this increases the
application fee.
I agree with Gil that the examination model is
not perfect, but overall it is fairer, more consistent,
less onerous and less costly than any reasonable
alternative.
Janet Mackenzie
Page 7
The Canberra Editor Vol 17 • Number 4 • May 2008

We want you...
...to be our new newsletter editor!

This is a fantastic opportunity to make a difference

to the society as well as gaining new skills.
Ideally you will have some experience of desktop publishing.
But don’t worry if you don’t—we can work around that.
You will need to be able to work to a deadline, and to work with contributors to ensure the
newsletter comes out regularly.

Contact Ted Briggs to find out more or to volunteer.

Email <tedbriggs@grapevine.com.au> Phone 6161 4924 (ah) 6265 0916 (bh)
Don’t wait to be asked!

Contents The Canberra Editor

Next meeting Wednesday 25 May 1 is published by Canberra Society of Editors,
April meeting report 1 PO Box 3222, Manuka ACT 2603.
IPEd Notes 2 © Canberra Society of Editors 2007. ISSN 1039-3358
New members 2 Opinions and statements in signed articles are the
From the President 3 responsibility of the author.
And yes, there’s more 3
Grammar’s in style … ‘Apostrophe’s’?
Newsletter schedule
Thinking about words: 6
The next newsletter will appear in June 2008 and for
wagging, dotting and dashing about
that issue the copy deadline is Friday 6 June.
IPEd response to Gil Garcon’s comments 7
The editor welcomes contributions by email to
Accreditation and beyond: 7 tedbriggs@grapevine.com.au, using Word for
your career as an editor Windows, for PC or Mac.

Print Post approved PP 299436/00098

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