Category Archives: Training

CIEP wise owls: continuing professional development for experienced editors

Welcome to the latest CIEP wise owls blog. This month, the owls provide advice on continuing professional development for experienced proofreaders and copy-editors.

Hazel Bird
If you’re feeling on top of your game with your editorial skills, consider improving your knowledge of the fields you edit and the conventions those fields use. For example, if you edit fiction, take a creative writing course. Or, if you edit history, attend a webinar, read a book that challenges you, or consider a course or qualification. You can also attend subject-specific conferences or join discussion groups on social media such as Facebook. The more you know about your specialist fields (or the fields you want to specialise in), the better you’ll be able to tap into how your clients think, what they want from you as an editor and what conventions their field will expect them to follow.

Melanie Thompson
Sometimes the best CPD comes from unexpected places. A long time ago I did a brief stint as a school governor. I was sent on a short training course, and I learned a lot from that about working in teams, understanding more about how schools tick, and – crucially – things about curriculum development and changes in teaching methods. A few years later I attended a “maths for parents” evening class at my son’s infant school and learned some handy new mental maths techniques. Fast forward to 2016 and I went along to a parents’ forum at my son’s (senior) school, where the discussion topic was “use of IT in classrooms”, especially ebooks and students’ use of tablet computers. All these lessons popped into my mind during a session on education publishing at this year’s SfEP conference, and continue to inform my approach to working in that sector.

John Espirian
Invest time in learning how to improve your website and how you can apply basic SEO to stand out. There are a million and one podcasts about digital marketing techniques. Listen to them while walking, driving, cooking, whatever. Even if only a tiny bit of that knowledge sticks, it will likely put you ahead of a lot of people who don’t know the first thing about optimising and promoting their online presence.

Answering questions on LinkedIn, Facebook and especially the SfEP forums will help you realise where you’re strong. Can you answer every question you come across? If not, what areas are you weak in? Why not deep-dive on those? How much of the SfEP’s own editorial syllabus do you know inside out?

Sue Littleford
Lack of money doesn’t mean you have to forego learning. These are all free of charge. Explore the world of MOOCs (massive online open courses) as a free way of developing your subject, editorial or business knowledge (e.g. from FutureLearn, and Oxford University is offering its first MOOC from February), and use HMRC’s free webinars and videos to make sure you’re on top of your self-assessment, and claiming the right business expenses. Keep up with tech changes. Each month pick one, say, Word function you struggle with and master it. Don’t waste your time fighting with your software – find a YouTube video to help you use it and sign up to the WordTips emails for daily or weekly emails and access to a library of tips. Join the macros SfEP forum to get an insight into how people use macros to save time and improve effectiveness, and get support as you try things out. Apply the same approach to other software you use.

Margaret Hunter
I’ve found that a good way to sharpen up my understanding of what it is that I’m doing is to think about how I explain the process to clients, especially non-publisher ones. Over the years I’ve written (and rewritten!) mini guides to help my clients, for example what happens during copy-editing and proofreading, and a checklist of things for self-publishing authors to think about. I’ve also put together business documents I need or find helpful, such as terms and conditions, a services contract, style sheet and queries templates, and the like. Thinking about how you explain your business to others could help you identify any gaps in your knowledge (go fill them!) and enable you to sharpen up your working practices to become more professional.

Posted by Tracey Roberts, CIEP blog coordinator

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

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Practice makes (closer to) perfect

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By Liz Jones

Imagine that you’ve recently completed some solid training in proofreading and/or copy-editing, and you’re looking forward to your new existence as a fully fledged editorial professional. But wait! How can you be sure you’re correctly applying all that you’ve learned?

One of the best places to learn is on the job, but this can be particularly stressful when you’re starting out. You want to be sure you’re doing the best work you can for a paying client – not only to offer them a good service for the money, but also to secure repeat business.

Here are some tips for getting valuable proofreading or copy-editing practice when you’re starting out, or if you’re expanding into new areas – without risking your reputation on a live job.

Mentoring

Once you’ve undertaken enough basic training, one further training route that the SfEP offers its members is mentoring (as do some other editorial organisations, such as EAC). You can be mentored in general proofreading or copy-editing, and there is now also the option of specialist mentoring in areas such as fiction, biomedical journals, law and music. Your mentor will send you exercises to work on (usually extracts from material they have edited previously) and will then provide you with detailed feedback and guidance on your strengths, as well as where you need to improve, over the course of several months. On successful completion of mentoring you will be awarded points that can be used towards upgrading your SfEP membership.

Books

You might choose to carry out practice in the form of further self-study after completing more formal courses. One book that comes highly recommended and has been used by many proofreaders when starting out is Advanced Professional Member Margaret Aherne’s Proofreading Practice: Exercises with model answers and commentary.

Forums

Those of us who work freelance can lack opportunities to simply lean over and ask a more experienced colleague for help if we get stuck, or if we don’t know where to turn to support an editorial decision. One ever-reliable source of information on best practice is the SfEP forums. You can ask your own question as it arises, or search the extensive archives to see if the topic has been discussed before. (Often, it has!) Alternatively, read the forums regularly and see what others are asking. Sometimes the battle when trying to improve as an editor is not finding the answer to a particular question – it’s finding out what questions it’s necessary to ask.

The SfEP forums aren’t the only places to go for advice. Other online forums, such as the Editors’ Association of Earth Facebook group, are also invaluable and easily accessed sources of advice and support, and can provide a slightly different perspective.

Critical appreciation of others’ work

This is one method that does require a live job and a dash of good fortune, but sometimes as a proofreader you will be lucky enough to see the work of an editorial professional employed earlier in the process, such as the copy-editor or the development/commissioning editor, as part of your proofreading or copy-editing job. Even a small insight into how someone else – perhaps someone considerably more experienced – works can be illuminating. Don’t simply collate what’s there, or skip over it – try to understand why editorial decisions have been taken, and what the implications are for you and the wider publishing process.

Local group

If you are able to attend a local SfEP group, this could provide an ideal opportunity to pick colleagues’ brains about best approaches to work. Perhaps you could suggest sharing examples of how group members have tackled real-life jobs, or short extracts from them … NDAs and client confidentiality permitting, of course.

Read, read, read

It sounds obvious, but it can be easy to overlook the need to read voraciously, outside of actual work. If you specialise in particular types of editing work, and most of us probably do, it’s obviously important to read widely in these areas – but really, almost any kind of reading will help to train your eye and help you to know what good writing looks like (and what it doesn’t). And let’s face it, it’s not as if more reading is a chore for most editors!

Finally …

This might sound obvious, but you can’t ever have too much practice. It’s possible to get up to speed with the basics of editing fairly quickly, but it can take years to get really good. You never stop learning, even over the course of decades – technology and software move on, and editorial fashions and tastes change. Keeping up to date with innovations and reflecting on your practice never stop being important.

By Liz Jones has been an editor since 1998, and full-time freelance since 2008; she is an Advanced Professional Member of the SfEP. She specialises in trade non-fiction, fiction and educational publishing, but also works with a range of business clients and individuals. When not editing she writes fiction, and also blogs about editing and freelancing at Eat Sleep Edit Repeat.

Posted by Tracey Roberts, SfEP blog coordinator.

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

Image: Photopin. Creative Commons (license).

How to style web addresses

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Here’s a question I’ve seen a few times of late: when writing out web addresses, must we include the whole address or is it safe to omit part of it?

Some house styles set out guidelines for writing web addresses. One would think, then, that the practice is simply a matter of style. In fact, it mostly is – but not always.

So that we know the names of the components that make up a web address, let’s take a look at an annotated example:

Keeping with protocol

Web addresses begin with a ‘protocol’, the most common being http:// and https://.

From the technical point of view, the protocol isn’t usually required when quoting web addresses. To use the CIEP’s own website as an example, all modern browsers will treat the following addresses as equivalent:

When it comes to being consistent, we wouldn’t usually want both styles of web address to appear in the same piece of work.

The complications tend to come about when we start introducing addresses with other protocols to the same document. For example, if we wanted to make specific reference to a secure website, it would be correct to indicate this by including the protocol in the address, such as:

https://www.dropbox.com

The intelligent reader will see the protocol and immediately understand that the website is secure, regardless of any other information about the site in the text.

Secure areas

Almost every website that has a secure area will also have rules that discreetly redirect users from the standard protocol (http://) to the secure protocol (https://). To demonstrate this, one can visit the following address:

www.dropbox.com

Now, because a protocol hasn’t been included in the example above, the browser will try to take the user to the http:// version of the site (this is the default behaviour of all web browsers). Seeing that action, the server running the website will automatically and immediately redirect the user to the https:// version.

In short, this means that, even for secure websites, a protocol isn’t usually required in the address. I write ‘usually’ because there are some rare cases where web servers may display the wrong page if the secure protocol is not specified.

In cases where any protocols are included so as to give the reader a cue, it stands to reason that all other web addresses in the same document should also include protocols, on grounds of consistency.

In a document where standard web addresses are the only ones used (i.e., http:// and nothing else), it seems unnecessary to include the protocol. Omitting the protocol is both consistent and technically correct.

Handling new domain names

One common reservation with omitting protocols is when it comes to the newer domain suffixes, many of which most readers may not have heard of. Here are some examples:

If you saw these in running text, would you know that they were web addresses? Or might you think they were the ends and beginnings of unspaced sentences? The caveat here is that if unusual or novel addresses are used in a document, they might be worth qualifying with a protocol – and in turn that would require every other address in the document to include a protocol, too (on the assumption that we’re going to be rigid about consistency).

The cautious editor could use this argument to recommend that protocols be included on all addresses, to prevent a major rekeying effort in the event that some novel address is later added to a work that had previously contained only run-of-the-mill addresses. You’d have to make a decision about whether this would be too cautious an approach. For what it’s worth, I’ve been omitting protocols for quite a while now, having previously been a staunch supporter of mandatory inclusion.

Omitting the ‘www.’ part of an address

Some people don’t know that it’s usually possible to omit the ‘www.’ part of a web address and still be able to retrieve the website. This part of the web address is known as the ‘subdomain’. Most web servers are set up so that the domain (the key part of the address) and the ‘www.’ subdomain each allow access to the website. Here is an example:

www.ciep.uk works and so does ciep.uk

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to omit what would otherwise be a redundant ‘www.’ from the address. Here are some examples:

http://www.u-psud.fr/ works but http://u-psud.fr/ does not

Trailing slashes

A trailing slash is the forward slash character (/) sometimes added to the end of a web address. This should be added only to the end of a domain name or a folder name in the address. Here are some examples:

www.example.com/ – correct
www.example.com/folder/ – correct
www.example.com/folder/file.html/ – incorrect

One might wonder why a trailing slash would ever be added to a web address, given that the website ought to be displayed just as well without it. The answer is that the appropriate use of the trailing slash eliminates one unnecessary request from your computer to the server, thereby reducing the load on the server. You might not notice any positive effect, but it’s still a good practice to adopt: very busy servers will run better if their load is lightened in any way.

Web addresses followed by punctuation

A web address directly followed by any punctuation mark has the potential to confuse, because some readers may incorrectly interpret the punctuation mark as being part of the address. Word processors and email programs can sometimes be guilty of this mistake, turning an otherwise correct address into a link that doesn’t work when clicked. Thankfully, this is less of an issue than it once was.

It’s quite easy to fall foul of the ‘address plus punctuation’ problem when copying and pasting an address. It’s therefore sensible to avoid directly following an address with a punctuation mark; however, if the context is clear or the readership is web savvy, there may be no need to reword the text.

In my opinion, the omission of a terminal punctuation mark for the sake of clarity is preferable to the occasional practice of adding a space between the address and the punctuation mark. As usual, we should be consistent in the handling of all such matters.

Conclusion

If your client’s style guide sets out preferences for how to write web addresses, you should of course follow those preferences. But be mindful of any newer types of address that might confuse readers, and check that all addresses do indeed work as written.

If you have no style guide from which to work, remember that it’s perfectly fine to use the shortest possible address that will result in the desired website being loaded correctly.

John Espirian (@espirian) was the CIEP’s (then SfEP’s) internet director and principal forum administrator.

As a freelance technical writer, John specialises in producing online help content that’s actually helpful. He is also a relentlessly helpful LinkedIn nerd.

Proofread by CIEP Advanced Professional Member Etty Payne.

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