Tag Archives: CIEP member

My CIEP journey

As she moves away from full-time editing, and steps down from her role on the CIEP information team, Liz Dalby looks back at what the CIEP has meant to her. (And what it will continue to mean in the future!)

I’ve been an editor for 24 years, and a member of the CIEP/SfEP for about 13 years. For the entire duration of my membership I’ve been a freelance editor, but I’ve recently changed career, and returned to full-time employment as a bid writer – more on which later.

Awareness of the SfEP

Although I only joined the SfEP after I went freelance, I’d been aware of it from very early in my editing career. My manager in my first publishing job handed me a slim booklet one afternoon and asked me to find a suitable proofreader for a project we were working on. This was the original hard copy incarnation of the SfEP Directory, now of course the online CIEP Directory of Editorial Services.

It wasn’t until I was working for myself, many years later, that I properly understood the value of a community of like-minded editors. I was living in rural Somerset, with my only professional contacts based in London and feeling increasingly distant and tenuous. Although I was fortunate enough to have a steady flow of work from in-house colleagues, I was aware of the precariousness of my set-up, and joined the SfEP mainly to improve my job prospects.

Finding a place in the community

However, I was soon caught up in wanting to prove myself and make my mark. I had a decade of experience behind me, and was determined to become an Advanced Professional Member as soon as possible. In fact, that turned out to be harder than I’d expected, not to mention bruising for the ego, but I got there before too long. What next? I wondered. I had a vague notion of wanting to get stuck in somehow, and perhaps even give something back.

I wrote to Gerard Hill, then in charge of the SfEP’s mentoring programme, and offered my services as a mentor. Gerard was kind enough to take me on – though, looking back, I still had an awful lot to learn myself about proofreading, let alone helping anyone newer to the profession to learn the art. But I went on to work as a proofreading and copyediting mentor for the next ten years, mentoring about 50 people in that time. I learned so much by doing this – we don’t often see the work of other editors in detail, so that was a complete privilege. I hope I helped the various mentees I worked with, too.

SfEP Council work

It was working as a mentor that got me noticed by the Council, and I was headhunted for the first and only time (so far!) in my life, joining the Council in 2013. I stayed for just a couple of years in the end. It was a fantastic experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed my work as professional development director in particular. However, it was A LOT to deal with on top of running a business full-time and dealing with two small children.

What I took from my Council experience, aside from professional development that might not have been open to me working purely as a freelance editor, was a deeper connection with the freelance editorial community. In the years since leaving the Council, I’ve tried to maintain that, and later moved into blogging about editing, both for myself and for the SfEP and later the CIEP. In this way I’ve kept in touch with the community and shared (and sometimes overshared) my thoughts on this strange and wonderful profession of ours.

Woman at a laptop taking notes

The CIEP’s information team

From 2019 until now I worked on the CIEP’s information team, being responsible first for the outward-facing newsletter, Editorial Excellence, and then the member newsletter, The Edit. With the other members of the team, under the guidance first of Margaret Hunter and most recently Abi Saffrey, I’ve also written and commissioned numerous resources such as fact sheets, focus papers and guides, on all aspects of editing and freelancing.

As I mentioned at the start of the article, though, I recently decided to change career. I’ve loved being an editor (and I do still do a little editing), but for a while I’ve also known that I wanted to give myself a new challenge and try something different. A quarter of a century is a really long time to do anything, and working freelance can take its toll after a while. I’m proud of the mental resilience that has enabled me to run a solo business for as long as I have, but I knew I was ready to return to a team and feel part of something larger.

Looking ahead

I now work for a foodservice company, writing executive summaries for new business proposals, and I absolutely love the work. It’s a breath of fresh air after so long in and around publishing. I am using all the skills I’ve amassed over the years, from writing to proofreading to project management, while also being immersed in a completely new industry. I still work mostly remotely, but I’m often in online meetings, and no two days are the same. I have absolutely no regrets about my midlife change of career.

But if I’m no longer strictly an editor, where does this leave my CIEP membership? I’ve seen friends and colleagues change career in the past, and sooner or later leave the CIEP, which is perfectly valid. However, I’m not ready to go just yet. For a start, I am still taking on a few selected editorial commissions, so it would seem responsible to keep up to date with best practice, and CIEP membership helps me do that. And I’m still working with words in my day job, so membership is still tangentially relevant. Finally, I’m simply not ready to leave the community of friends and colleagues to which I have given a lot but also got more back in return. I never could have lasted so long on my own without it.

The last few years have been momentous for the CIEP, as it’s changed its name, acquired chartered status, and many things about the way it is governed and run have evolved. And for now I really want to see where the institute goes next as a fully paid-up member, not an interested observer.

About Liz Dalby

Liz DalbyLiz Dalby has been a communications professional for 25 years – the first 24 as an editor, with a recent move into bid writing. As an editor, she worked on thousands of mostly non-fiction projects for a huge range of clients. She also worked on the CIEP information team from 2019 to 2023. She enjoys blogging about aspects of editing, writing and freelancing. When she’s not working with words, she likes yoga, running and painting.

 

About the CIEP

The Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) is a non-profit body promoting excellence in English language editing. We set and demonstrate editorial standards, and we are a community, training hub and support network for editorial professionals – the people who work to make text accurate, clear and fit for purpose.

Find out more about:

 

Photo credits: header image by Matt Howard on Unsplash, woman at a laptop taking notes by Judit Peter on Pexels.

Posted by Eleanor Smith, blog assistant.

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

Forum matters: Efficacious, efficient, efficiently

This feature comes from the band of CIEP members who volunteer as forum moderators. You will only be able to access links to posts if you’re a forum user and logged in. Find out how to register.

We’re all on the lookout for ways to extend our skills and increase our income by working more quickly – and many members are happy to share their experiences on the forums.

Type ‘efficient’ into the forum search function and you get umpteen results, containing hundreds of posts. Try it! It’s a great example of how the CIEP forums offer editorial professionals an indispensable source of practical ideas, sound advice and general support on almost any topic.

Training pays dividends

The search found links to the Efficient Editing course. CIEP courses help you to develop good practices, to increase your knowledge and to improve your expertise. All this development helps you work more efficiently and more quickly, and your hourly earnings should go up. Did you know that if you can drum up the numbers then you can run a CIEP course just for your local group? One effect of the lockdown is that the CIEP is now running some of these courses, including Efficient Editing, via webinar.

Making the most of technology

Local groups – including the Cloud Clubs – often talk ‘efficient’ and share the benefits of specific macros or apps. Efficiency is also a big topic on SfEPLine, which is the best forum in which to discuss technological and practical approaches to some of the more mechanical aspects of proofreading in particular. Checking references is one such time-consuming task, and among the recommendations are Edifix and Recite, with much lamentation over the demise of ReferenceChecker. But contributors also share good suggestions for using more hands-on approaches to managing references, such as the ideal number of passes or the breakdown into single tasks (eg are all the full stops there/not there at the end of the line?). The consensus is that much depends on how your brain works and that therefore there is no ‘right answer’ – the most efficient approach is the one that works for you (the search term ‘references’ brings up over 1,300 posts).

Among the software recommended by forum members for improving editing efficiency are PerfectIt, the Editor’s Toolkit, ProWritingAid and text expanders. But they all come with the caveat that you do need to know what you are doing, or you could end up introducing many more errors – very inefficient, if not downright incompetent.

In praise of manuals

The world isn’t entirely technical, though, and manuals and dictionaries (hard copy and online) still have a role to play in upping your efficiency. Style manuals get a thumbs-up, particularly the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), although the first step is to get to grips with their highly organised layout so that you can find what you need without spending hours searching.

A false dawn?

Another hotbed of discussion is the impact on academic editing of project management companies. These sold themselves to publishers on the ‘efficiency equals cheapness’ premise by using pre-editing software that is supposed to give the copyeditor a head start by creating a manuscript that is consistent and formatted. They assume that the copyeditor will therefore need to spend less time editing, hence the job will be cheaper. The trouble is that algorithms aren’t (yet) language speakers, so copyeditors still need to check for sense and context. What has been sold as a time-efficient system can lead to increasing the work. Sometimes the manuscript can only be worked on using a project management company’s own software – and this sort of bespoke software may not work with a copyeditor’s treasured macros, which has the reverse effect on efficiency. There are a number of recent, and less recent, threads on working with project management companies.

Use your styles

A properly formatted manuscript is a diamond and indicates a skilful, professional producer. Too many writers don’t understand the impact of direct formatting on how the copy transfers from original manuscript to finished publication (direct formatting is, for example, when you turn a single word italic or bold using the symbols on the home page, or go through the laborious process of creating spacing with double paragraph returns or using tabs for indentations). Setting up and using properly defined styles benefits the whole production line – see ‘Losing italics from Word to PDF’. By stripping out direct formatting and applying correct styles, you are also increasing the typesetter’s efficiency.

Managing time, maintaining health

Social media is a cunning efficiency interrupter, and members are keen to share ways of avoiding information overload. This often comes down to time management, beginning with the simple task of spending the first few minutes of your day writing out a simple to-do list (and then sticking to it), to allocating specific time slots for looking at your social media, to signing up to time-tracking software or software that interrupts you every so often and tells you to move! One thread on ‘Difficulty concentrating’ drew out so many fantastic ideas on how to refresh your brain that it would be impossible to summarise them here.

Time to end with the oft-repeated mantra that it’s essential to maintain your health and wellbeing – and no amount of efficiency gain is worth compromising those (thanks, Sue Browning):

Last but by no means least, I find taking time to get some exercise, preferably in the fresh air, pays dividends in focus and productivity. Even when time is tight, a few minutes throwing a ball for the dog in the garden can refresh me for the next stint of work.


Photo credits: This must be the place – Tim Mossholder; dawn – M Mitchell; dog – Afra Ramió, all on Unsplash

Proofread by Mike Smith, Intermediate Member.
Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

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