Monthly Archives: September 2019

Proofreading as a digital nomad

By Christina Petrides

Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved travelling. I don’t know if it’s the actual journey, the destination, the excitement of exploring, or a combination of all three but I know that I’m happiest in an airport, on a plane, arriving in a new country, and taking those first, tentative steps to discovering the culture of a new place.

A sprawling city and the sky viewed from a hill.That desire to travel has followed me my entire life. All through university and into my first job. Onto my second job. And my third. And on it went. My itchy feet syndrome came up regularly in conversation: Have I booked another trip yet? When am I next flying off? What fun stories can I regale them with from my last trip? I would take notes on my travels and dream of writing a book of short stories one day.

I put my wanderlust to the back of my mind as best I could and proceeded to build a career for myself in the environmental industry. That was my second love – the environment. When I graduated with an environmental degree, I got my first lucky break and found a job with the then Department for Environment working in the policy team. The job was interesting, but policy work bored me to tears. Things moved at a glacial speed whereas I thrived on the excitement and fast pace of project work.

Soon enough, I got lucky again. An internal move saw me land a job that allowed me to combine the two: promoting the environmental sector and travelling to Asia to do it. I got the excitement and the travels!

But cutbacks meant it couldn’t last forever, so after a couple of years I moved into environmental exhibitions marketing. That was my first experience of copyediting. In fact, it was probably the first time I’d ever heard the term. I wrote and edited advert copy, worked with designers on banners and flyers, and cut deals with trade magazines on placement and promotion. When the time came to proofread the show catalogue before it went to the printer I relished the detailed work and the opportunity to set things straight. This was other people’s businesses we were dealing with; we had to get it right.

I loved it, but not enough. Exhibitions were fun, but not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The environment sector pulled me back in and I settled into consultancy for the next decade. It had everything that I loved: I worked on all sorts of projects, large and small; I managed teams of specialists, juggling information and acting as the liaison between them and clients; I compiled reports from multiple authors, copyediting and proofreading before they went into the public domain; I even got to do a little travelling from time to time to unusual and exciting places.

By now I had hit my forties. Life has a funny way of reminding you what’s important when you get there. Call it a mid-life crisis, call it reality hitting, but a little seed planted itself in my mind and this time it wouldn’t go away – travel. Just get on a plane and go! Before long, that niggling thought became a screaming siren that I could no longer ignore.

I quit my job and booked a one-way ticket to Colombia. I was going to spend four months travelling around South America to get this out of my system and then get back to work. Even if it was only to save enough money for the next adventure. I blogged my way around six countries, documenting the stories that could one day make their way into that book, assuming I ever get around to writing it.

I remember it being a bright afternoon in Cusco, Peru, and I was walking up a cobblestone street filled with tourist shops when I made the decision. I realised that I couldn’t face another job and another decade of living in London, so I had to find a way of working while I travelled. I had met all sorts of people on my journey and one of them was a proofreader. It got me thinking … Don’t I already do that – at least in some form?

On my return, I made a call to the then SfEP (now the CIEP): What did I need to do to become a proofreader? They recommended the Publishing Training Centre, so I enrolled onto their Basic Proofreading course and studied before and after work. I gave myself a year to complete it, save up enough money and make a start on finding some clients.

It took 18 months. By the time my bags were packed I had a new career as a proofreader and copywriter and had four regular clients: a website designer who needed a proofreader and writer for the sites he built for tradespeople, retail and service providers; an agency that matched proofreaders with dyslexic and disabled students who required proofreading services; a financial services provider who needed a little extra help with their corporate communications; and an existing environmental client who wanted to retain my services as a freelance.

I also had a one-way ticket to Cambodia and a plan to spend the next few months travelling around Asia. After that, who knew?

The red light of dawn viewed through leaves and branches.This month marks two years since I packed up my flat and my bags and I haven’t looked back. Along the way I have spent time in 12 different countries and continued to add new clients to my books.

None of my clients are in the traditional publishing sector; it’s an area I know nothing about and trying to break into it seemed like an exercise in futility. Instead, I focused on what and who I knew. I spread the word about my new career and lifestyle and those that heard it spread it further. I leveraged the work experience I had from my previous careers and used it to demonstrate what I could do.

I still work in the environmental consultancy sector, albeit in a more strategic and reviewing role, and the various parts of my life have begun to overlap. One environmental client recently asked me to proofread a bid they had going out, and the travel blogger I proofread for loves the extra edits and suggestions he gets from me from places I’ve been to that he’s writing about.

I have done some very interesting work and I have done some mind-numbingly boring work. I have written website copy and blogs for accountants, plumbers, personal trainers, and wedding gown retailers – most of which I know nothing about so have had to learn, and fast. I have proofread theses and essays from subjects as varied as ecology, law and socioeconomics, newsletters on financial planning, and website content for restaurants, dentists, and market traders.

But I get to work at my own pace, in a location of my choosing, and without having to sweat my way to work on the tube. I learn something new from each proofreading and writing job that I do, and with each one I realise how much more there is still to learn. And I’ve already got the next exciting venture on the go, bringing it all together: a website for those who want to travel but are afraid to go it alone. If I can do it, you can do it too, whether you want to take your work with you or not.

Headshot of Christina Petrides.Not that long ago Christina Petrides packed up her high heels and gave up her London Oyster card to work as a freelance. Having worked in the environmental and marketing sectors for nearly two decades, she now runs her own copywriting, proofreading and environmental consulting business. She is a life-long traveller; and just one of an increasing number of digital nomads making the most of good WiFi and flexible working.


CIEP’s Cloud Club is made up of a number of CIEP members located in countries around the world, together with members who are in far-flung parts of the UK and find it almost impossible to get to local group meetings perfect for digital nomads!


Proofread by Joanne Heath, Entry-Level Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

Photo credits: Bogota, Colombia – Jorge Gardner on Unsplash;  Krong Siem Reap, Cambodia – Kevin Tomsett on Unsplash.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

 

The right tone: how to edit writing about classical music

By Paul Kilbey

Music sheets on a stand in an auditorium with blue walls.Editing classical music text is much like editing anything else, except that the text continually reminds you that the subject matter is a whole language of its own, but one that resists all attempts at translation or explication. True, classical music has its own vocabulary, but it is insufficient for many reasons: it’s horribly technical, it relies on huge amounts of background knowledge, and half of it is basically Italian. It’s difficult – and that’s an understatement – to capture in writing the essence of how the music feels, to hint at what it really seems to mean.

Try and describe what’s actually going on in a piece of music, and you will either get ludicrously specific very fast, or stay almost hopelessly vague. One of the first questions an editor has to ask is who the text is for: text for academics or knowledgeable classical music fans is quite different from text for newcomers, to the extent that specialist text can feel like its own dialect, much like legalese. Tell a newcomer, for instance, that the major-key exposition’s second subject is in the mediant, and they’ll look at you blankly – and quite right too. Tell an aficionado, and they’ll say, ‘Goodness gracious! You mean it isn’t in the dominant?’

While this is an issue when editing work on any topic, with classical music it is particularly acute. It’s vital to make sure that writers speak consistently in the right register (to borrow a musical term): to put yourself in the shoes of a reader with whatever level of musical knowledge, and make sure that the text will sound right to them. There’s a perpetual debate in classical music concerning elitism: an art form with wealthy patrons and connotations of high culture has to take special care not to appear cut off from society at large. Getting the tone of the text right is therefore a very delicate balance: newbies have to be welcomed with open arms, while connoisseurs must be treated unpatronisingly.

Having a decent knowledge of classical music isn’t a prerequisite for this sort of editorial work, but it’s certainly a great advantage. I studied music at university, and am thrilled to have found one of the few careers (outside actually performing or writing music) in which my knowledge of fugue terminology, Schoenberg opus numbers and the libretto to The Rake’s Progress has been genuinely helpful, rather than something to be irritatingly shown off at bad parties. It’s unpredictable which areas of knowledge will be called upon for a given editing task, but as well as understanding the full gamut of technical terms, from squillo to Personenregie, it’s important to have familiarity with the basics of not just Italian but also German and French. It doesn’t hurt to know how accents work in Hungarian, too. Plus, on occasion, you’ll need to navigate musical scores, to confirm tempo markings or texts or instrumentations. And of course, it helps to know what all the works you’re reading about actually sound like.

Sheet music with notes etched in pencil on it.All that said, as an editor (and writer), I sometimes regret not studying English – I regretted this even during my degree, in fact, and still treasure the English faculty library pencil I plucked up the courage to buy in my fourth year. But studying music hasn’t just given me an editorial specialism: it’s also given me a different perspective from which to think about language in general. I often find myself reading text out loud, whether I’m editing it or not, because I want to hear how it sounds. I want to hear how the rhythms flow, how the vowels and the consonants arrange themselves as I say them. I listen to the cadences – a precise, analytical term in music, but beautifully ambiguous in language.

That’s why I take such joy in editing, I think: I like to make words sing. With just the smallest changes made, so much text can instantly become so sonorous. You can think of grammar, punctuation and syntax conventions as rigid rules, but I like to think of them as tools with which language can be made to sound as elegant as a song, as enthralling as a symphony, as dramatic as an opera.

None of this helps with the basic problem of how to effectively talk about music using language. That’s a problem that may not have a solution at all. But still, if we can never do justice to music through writing, the least we can do is use musical words.

Headshot of Paul Kilbey.Paul Kilbey is a freelance writer and editor who mainly works on classical music text. He is a Professional Member of the CIEP and lives in Munich.

 

 


Editorial Excellence is the CIEP’s e-newsletter; it aims to spread awareness of and encourage good practice in copyediting and proofreading.


Proofread by Emma Easy, Entry-Level Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

Photo credits: music stand – Andrey Konstantinov on Unsplash; sheet music Marius Masalar on Unsplash.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the CIEP.

Punctuating quotes: UK and US differences

Outside or inside, before or after? Punctuating quotes can be a bit of a minefield, as Luke Finley points out.Us-UK English

A quick search on the SfEP forums reveals that punctuating quotes is an area that trips many of us up – and not just those with less experience. This isn’t a surprise, because there’s extensive variation in the conventions. In this column I focus on quotes in non-fiction texts: conventions for reported speech in fiction are arguably even more subjective.

Academic/formal writing

In academic writing and other materials that cite in a strict academic style (policy papers and the like), the conventions are fairly fixed.

UK/US variation

In US English, closing punctuation goes inside the quote marks, whether the quote is a complete sentence or not, and whether the punctuation was there in the original quoted material or not:

Svolik identifies the “twin problems of dictatorship,” going on to explore how different institutions address these problems.

In UK English, in the same example the comma would follow the closing quote mark (which would more usually be a single quote mark – but that’s another story). However, UK English does put the closing punctuation inside the quote marks if the quote is, or ends with, a complete sentence:

Balkin says that ‘almost all political activity may be constitutional. Often we may only know what counts later on, when practice and precedents become settled.’

Punctuating with citations

Where a parenthetical citation (eg in author–date style) appears immediately after the quote, the punctuation follows it, in UK or US style:

‘… precedents become settled’ (Balkin, 2011).

Displayed quotes

In displayed quotes there are typically no quote marks to interfere with the closing punctuation. In this case, if there is a citation it follows the closing punctuation:

… precedents become settled. (Balkin, 2011)

Other non-fiction texts

Separating quotes from text

Where quoted material is part of a longer sentence, it’s often separated from the text using commas:

He said, ‘show me where the comma should be’.

In more formal writing, or where the quoted material is longer, a colon might take the place of the comma. Or it might be omitted altogether for very short quotes or where the quote is integrated into the syntax of the sentence:

About commas, he said simply ‘Hate them!’

He said that he was kept awake at night worrying about ‘the horrors of punctuation’.

Punctuation inside or out?

The UK approach is generally to be guided by whether or not the punctuation ‘belongs’ to the quoted matter. ‘Belongs’ is often interpreted (eg The Economist Style Guide goo.gl/w52udb) to mean a natural pause regardless of how the original quote was punctuated.

‘This sentence’, she said, ‘has a full stop but no commas.’

‘On the other hand,’ she continued, ‘this sentence has both.’

The US approach – which is common in British fiction and increasingly in journalistic writing – is to punctuate inside the quote marks regardless of whether the sense of the quoted matter requires it.

Use your own good judgement

As is clear from my qualified statements, these are conventions, not hard-and-fast rules. Sources such as Butcher’s Copy-editing and New Hart’s Rules are good for the range of approaches but don’t necessarily tell you which to use in a particular case. Others, such as Trask’s Penguin Guide to Punctuation, offer their own preferred approach – which may be clear and persuasively argued, but doesn’t necessarily preclude a different approach.

In the end, it comes down to your client’s preference, the need for consistency and your own judgement. For example, Trask argues for minimal punctuation – why use additional marks to signal that a quote is coming up when the quote marks already do that job? This notion is attractively straightforward but, as an editor or especially as a proofreader, you won’t always be in a position to impose such an approach.

 

Luke FinleyLuke Finley, an Advanced Professional Member of the SfEP, set up Luke Finley Editorial in 2013 and left the public sector soon after, to edit and proofread full time. He will edit just about anything but specialises in social policy.

 

 


This article first appeared in the SfEP magazine, Editing Matters, in November 2016.


Posted by Abi Saffrey, SfEP blog coordinator.

Picture credit: raphink, on Pixabay.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the SfEP.

Five things to take to the SfEP conference

By Abi Saffrey

It’s just over a week until the 2019 SfEP conference. This year, I’m leading a workshop on editorial project management but, while writing my slides, I got a bit distracted by thinking about what I need to take with me. And then I started to wonder what other delegates would be taking with them, so I went onto the SfEP’s conference forum and asked. Here are my (and my respected colleagues’) recommendations of what to put in that wheelie case before heading to Aston University in Birmingham on 14 September.

1. Home comforts

Conference accommodation can be unpredictable – the pillows too firm, the duvets too thick, the shower room too tiny – but it’s possible to mitigate those issues by taking something from home. Okay, you can’t take your bathroom, but you could take a pillow or pillowcase, a sheet, even a small fan. At some venues, if you bring a hairdryer, you’ll gain brownie points from other delegates. They may even stand you a drink at the bar. But this year we can all travel light, because Aston’s rooms are truly luxurious with hairdryers, irons (and accompanying boards), fans, bedside lights and adequately sized bathrooms.

2. Food and drink

I will be taking my refillable water bottle, because I love a bit of hydration – especially important in air-conditioned seminar rooms and when spending the best part of three days talking (and laughing). Emergency and preferred teabags are worth shoving in your case, as you never know what will be on offer in bedrooms or at break times. Ditto snack items – whether you prefer sweets or bananas, you’re going to need energy to keep the brain whirring.

Good news: there is a small supermarket a short stroll from the Aston conference centre, so Minstrels are always within reach (other chocolate products are available).

3. Something for the quiet moments

Conferences are tiring, especially if you normally work at home with only a furry companion to talk to for hours on end. How strange that editors often take books with them for their downtime. Other portable hobbies that can provide an essential mental and physical breather include music, colouring, sketching, sewing, running and wine.

Aston does have a delightful little swimming pool that is open to delegates at certain times, so remember to pack appropriate attire if you fancy a dip. This year, there will also be a Quiet Room in the conference centre, so that delegates can easily take time out during the busy days.

4. Something for the actual conference

It turns out that the SfEP conference isn’t all about chatting with edibuddies; there’s also some of that there learning going on. Take an open mind and some confidence – listen to others’ ideas and speak your own. If you’re prone to a grumpy resting face, see if you can dig out a smile or two (for use when appropriate).

You’ll need something to take notes with/on, whether that’s a laptop, mobile device or a notebook and pens (preferably lots, and in different colours). And don’t forget the charger (and additional power pack) for those electronic devices, especially if you’re live tweeting (this year, the conference’s hashtag is #sfep2019).

Consider your clothing selections – a conference is not the right time to try out new shoes. Go comfy (and clean).

Remember business cards in case of networking successes or prize draws.

5. Medication

Nearly everyone who responded to my call for suggestions mentioned medication – either for an existing condition or painkillers for the headaches that come from thinking, talking and those lightbulb moments. (I refer the honourable reader to the earlier point about hydration.)

And don’t forget!

It’s the UK! The weather does what it wants. It turns out that coats quite often get left at home, and are later missed.


With thanks to SfEP conference goers and forum regulars, veterans and devotees: Hugh Jackson, Helen Stevens, Anya Hastwell, Sue Browning, Julia Sandford-Cooke, Luke Finley, Jane Hammett, Denise Cowle, Margaret Hunter, Jane Moody, Beth Hamer, Cathy Tingle, Sabine Citron and Melanie Thompson (and those who have contributed to the discussion after this was written).

 

Abi Saffrey will be taking decaf teabags, a water bottle, her swimmers, well-worn trainers, bananas, her laptop, her resting grumpy face and hopefully a completed set of PowerPoint slides to this year’s conference.

 

 

Proofread by Victoria Hunt, Intermediate Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, SfEP blog coordinator.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the SfEP.