Tag Archives: CPD

A finer point: Subject–verb agreement

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Rules are often made to be ‘flexible’, and one such case is agreeing subjects with verbs. In this interesting and informative post, Dan Beardshaw breaks it down.

Subject–verb agreement involves matching the singular or plural form of a sentence’s subject (either a noun or a pronoun) with the form of the verb that follows it. The basic rule is that a singular subject takes a singular verb and a plural subject, a plural verb. However, the rules of English rarely come without exceptions, and subject–verb agreement has its fair share of them.

Firstly, some nouns have a singular form but a collective, plural sense and are often used with a plural verb. And, vice versa, plural nouns can have a singular sense and take a singular verb. The linguistic term for such instances is notional agreement. Secondly, the subject of many sentences is a longer noun phrase that includes both singular and plural nouns or pronouns, and choosing which one the verb should agree with is not always straightforward. A common basis for decisions in this kind of sentence involves agreement with the noun positioned nearest to the verb, and is referred to with the terms proximity or attraction.

In this post I will explore these two types of irregular subject–verb agreement and how to approach decisions around them.

Singular nouns with a plural sense

Normal subject–verb agreement simply matches singular and plural verbs with their corresponding nouns.

The meadow is full of wildflowers.

The wildflower meadows are stunning this year.

But certain singular nouns can be used with a collective sense, or ‘notion’. For example, the word team is singular, but we often tend to think of the members who collectively form the team rather than the abstract idea of a single team. Or perhaps we think of both at the same time. Regardless, it’s common to treat singular team as a plural in subject–verb agreement.

The team are performing brilliantly.

The plural notion may also be influenced by context. In the above sentence, it’s the actions of the individual members and the way they work together that are of interest. In other words, the concrete actions of people are the focus rather than the abstract idea of a team. If team is purposely used to focus on that abstract idea, a singular verb might be more appropriate.

Each new team is given a unique name.

Other singular nouns commonly treated as plurals include staff, family, government, army, crowd, majority, number and party (in the political sense). Try forming sentences with some of these singular nouns and they will often sound unnatural with a singular verb – or, at least, plural agreement will sound natural and make intuitive sense.

The family are visiting us next week.

A majority think reducing plastic waste is a priority.

Plural nouns with a singular sense

Certain plural nouns, compounds and noun phrases are commonly treated as notionally singular. One example is things that are quantified or measured and expressed as a unit.

Six hundred pounds was the price she quoted.

Three days isn’t long enough to see all the sights.

Another example is noun phrases that form a single idea, despite featuring plural nouns.

Fewer cars in cities results in reduced pollution and improved public health.

Certain noun phrases using and, despite technically being a two-item list, can be treated as a notionally singular unit.

Fish and chips is the nation’s favourite takeaway.

A similar structure is common for simple mathematical additions expressed in words.

Seven and three is ten.

Six plus two is eight.

And some nouns that appear to be plural, such as politics, news, several academic subjects (economics,mathematics, physics), and certain proper nouns (for example, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Arab Emirates) are usually read as singular and also take a singular verb.

four lightbulbs together and one on its own, about to swing towards the others

The principle of proximity

Sometimes a sentence includes a mixture of singular and plural nouns, such that it could logically agree with either verb form. However, a decision must obviously be made. So on what basis can we make it? One approach, which will often read more naturally, involves the linguistic concept of proximity or attraction. Perhaps proximity is the clearer term as it simply refers to the verb agreeing with the noun it’s closest to in the sentence. This may appear in sentences including either/or or both/and structures. In the following sentence, the verb has eaten would agree with the dog and have eaten would agree with the cats. As the cats is nearest, the plural verb is used.

Either the dog or the cats have eaten my biscuits.

Another common place to find the principle of proximity in use is when a singular noun with a collective sense is paired with a corresponding plural. This type of sentence may involve a dual sense of agreement that references both proximity and the collective notion of the singular noun.

The group of tourists were struggling to communicate in an unfamiliar language.

A number of residents are unhappy about the development plans.

Pronouns and determiners

Notional agreement and the proximity principle can be complicated further by certain pronouns when used as the subject of a sentence or clause, or when certain determiners are used to modify the subject. The indefinite pronouns none and each can sometimes be used with singular and plural verbs interchangeably, and some of their related determiners, such as none of and each of, can express a singular or plural sense of their own that modifies the subject in potentially ambiguous ways. The conventions of verb agreement for these pronouns and determiners can be confusingly inconsistent.

None, no and none of

The pronoun none literally means ‘not any’ or ‘not one’, which is hard to pin down as either singular or plural – it raises the philosophical question of how we can define or describe the nature of absence. Nevertheless, it has an obviously useful communicative purpose beyond such musings, and, despite the insistence by some that none is always singular, in common use it’s frequently lent either a singular or plural sense by the context it appears in. For example, the following use of none refers to the singular (uncountable) noun sunshine and takes the singular verb was.

We’ve just had two weeks of sunshine but there was none for most of the summer.

Whereas the following use refers to the plural noun tickets and takes the plural verb were.

I looked everywhere for tickets but none were left.

However, an alternative notional sense may also appear: in the following, the speaker wanted one room but looked in many places, so a plural verb with the pronoun is a logical choice even though the noun it references is technically singular.

I looked everywhere for a hotel room but none were available.

The determiners related to none are no and none of. Simple subject–verb agreement will often not be affected by the use of no. The following sentence uses the singular is in agreement with the singular uncountable milk.

There is no milk left.

Whereas the following uses the plural are in agreement with the plural apples.

There are no apples left.

But ambiguity becomes more likely with the use of none of. Constructions like the following are common, especially in formal writing.

None of the suggestions is suitable.

The question raised is whether the verb should agree with the sense of the determiner (that is, if one sees none of as strictly singular) or the sense of the plural noun it modifies (suggestions) – and if the latter is preferred, the principle of proximity may also come into play.

None of the suggestions are suitable.

Each and each of

Similar dynamics are involved with the different forms of each, despite them having a clearer singular sense in and of themselves. As a determiner, it will usually be used with a singular noun and a corresponding singular verb.

Each episode was more intense than the last.

The pronoun form may refer to a plural noun but still take a singular verb.

There are two set menus, and each is equally delicious.

Like none of, the determiner each of often takes a singular verb when used with a plural subject, especially in formal writing.

Each of the candidates is required to attend two rounds of interviews.

But it can also take a plural verb in notional agreement with a plural subject, as in the following sentence.

Each of the vendors have been asked to tender for contract.

Again, this may be considered more informal, but both the notional sense of the sentence and the principle of proximity make it logically defensible.

Break the rules

Notional agreement and the principle of proximity are good examples of the imperfect logic of language and its simultaneous flexibility in creating intelligible meaning by breaking the rules. It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘pure’ logic of grammar in decisions of this kind, but that logic doesn’t always apply neatly to either the form of written language or the ways people think about words and sentences.

Resources

Butterfield, J (ed.) (2015). Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Oxford University Press, 30, 557.

New Hart’s Rules (2014). Oxford University Press, 191.

Chicago Manual of Style (2017). 17th edn. University of Chicago Press, 5.138. Online edition: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed17/part2/ch05/psec138.html

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/notional-agreement-subject-verb-principle-proximity

https://www.thoughtco.com/notional-agreement-grammar-1691439

https://www.thoughtco.com/proximity-agreement-grammar-1691697

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/no-none-and-none-of

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/each

About Dan Beardshaw

Dan Beardshaw is a development editor, copyeditor and proofreader, specialising in ELT and education publishing. He is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP.

 

 

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: figures on a wall by geralt on Pixabay, lightbulbs by Rodolfo Clix on Pexels, apples by Susanne Jutzeler on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Flying solo: Training and CPD as a business asset

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In ‘Flying solo’ this time around, Sue Littleford sets out why we should always consider training and CPD a vital cog to keep the wheels of our business turning.

Huh? A business asset? Training and continuing professional development? Well, yes, that’s exactly what it is. And as with the acquisition of any asset for your business, it’s something you should approach with deliberation.

If anything will bear a cost–benefit analysis for a sole trader or other small business, it’s the investment of your time and money in refreshing and developing skills and learning new ones. So let’s take a look, first, at the benefit side of that equation.

The benefits of training and CPD

  • Knowing what you’re doing: investing in your training, rather than relying merely on having a good grasp of spelling, punctuation and grammar, is one of the principal ways to keep imposter syndrome at bay. You will know you know what you’re doing.
  • Marketing: when you’re confident that you know what you’re doing, it’s so much easier to market yourself and to craft robust CV and website text. Ayesha Chari demonstrated this beautifully when she wrote her out-of-office message before attending the 2023 CIEP conference: ‘I’m taking time off for CPD this month to raise my editing skills and business services for my clients!’ Clients do love a supplier who is up to date and investing in their skills, and I shall be brazenly stealing Ayesha’s idea!
  • Upgrading: I’ve been to the upgrade Q&A at the last two CIEP conferences and know that training is absolutely key for upgrading, as is evidence of recent CPD to become an Advanced Professional Member, so lay the groundwork now, with a solid basis in the core skills (how to actually proofread and/or copyedit) as a launchpad for future needs when you niche down. No knowledge is ever wasted. And a Professional (or Advanced Professional) Member badge on your website, marketing materials and socials is a great selling point.
  • Upgrading to at least Professional membership is not only a requirement for remaining in the CIEP beyond seven years, it also feeds into marketing as then you can take out an entry in the Directory, the go-to place to find an editor or proofreader for a huge range of clients. You can complete the training section of your Directory entry as another way of demonstrating to clients that you’ve invested in providing a good and knowledgeable service to them.
  • Working efficiently and effectively: when you achieve this, you can improve the effective hourly rate you achieve in fixed-fee jobs, as well as feeling in control of your business.

Woman writing in a notebook

The costs side of the equation

  • As with any asset, you need to decide what it is you need to learn, where you’re going to source it from, and exactly which course from many offers to choose. When you’re spending your own money on training, rather than your employer’s, these decisions become acutely important.
  • Budget time to do the course as well as the money to pay for it. It’s a waste if you buy a course then never find the time to do the learning. With self-directed courses, it’s far too easy to keep kicking that can down the road until access to the course is running out and you sprint through it far too quickly to get the most out of your investment.
  • Besides the time spent on the course itself, also budget for time to elapse between courses. Allow yourself the chance to embed your learning, to practise those new skills and to make them your own. Filling your head with a cascade of new ideas to implement can lead to incoherence, overwhelm and, yes, imposter syndrome. Take a breather between courses.
  • Plan: you can’t do everything; you certainly can’t do everything all at once. There’s a tab on the Training and CPD spreadsheet in the Going Solo toolkit (CIEP members only) to keep a wish list of courses you want to do. If you’re interested in learning more about a particular aspect of editing, then you can use that tab to keep a record of potential courses, and weigh up the pros and cons of doing each one.
  • Go with reputable suppliers for the biggest marketing bang for your buck, and the best educational opportunities. I’ve seen some courses offer the world for £29.99, on websites where they have a distance-learning course for every topic under the sun. Don’t waste your £29.99 – they’re not tremendous value, they’re inadequate training. They will not take you from novice to accomplished editor in ten easy lessons.
  • Where you can, prioritise courses that have some form of assessment, and tutor support. Checking your work against model answers is all very well, but properly supported training is invaluable when you’re getting your core skills under your belt. Such courses will take more effort on your part. Good! They’ll also impress clients more.
  • Speaking of costs, in the UK not all training is tax-deductible. Training that keeps your skills up to date is an allowable business expense. Training that puts you in the position to begin trading, or extend your business into a new area, even if it’s a related one, is not.
  • Record-keeping: back to the Going Solo toolkit for another tab: completed training. Keep a good record of the training you’ve taken and be ready for easier upgrading. The spreadsheet was designed with the upgrades process in mind – the Admissions Panel has approved it, so you can just send in your spreadsheet (trim it of the unnecessary tabs before you do) to save having to type out every editorial course you’ve ever done on the application form.

Never think you know it all

You don’t know it all. No one does. I know I don’t! There’s always more to learn in our ever-evolving field – that’s one of the joys of being an editor or proofreader!

I’m always disheartened when people say to me that there’s nothing more for them to learn, that they did one course, five years ago, so they’re ‘qualified’, and there’s nothing more they need to know. (Yes, I’ve really had people say that to me.)

There’s no ‘qualification’ per se in the editorial world. Graded membership, as in the CIEP, and Australia and New Zealand Aotearoa’s Institute of Professional Editors (IPEd), is pretty rare, and the best proxy for ‘qualification’. Other countries and other membership organisations have certification courses but this is not the same ‘qualified’ as a doctor, a lawyer or a civil engineer. No editor should be speaking of being ‘qualified’ in that sense. And qualified doctors, lawyers and civil engineers (among many others) have a requirement to evidence a minimum number of CPD hours each year to retain membership of their professional organisation.

Unless you keep abreast of what’s out there, you may not even know what you don’t know. Be curious – a key requirement for good editing. Read the CIEP’s Curriculum for professional development to see what else you might pursue and don’t forget training beyond editing if you’ve got a need for subject-specific learning, or, indeed, business-skills learning.

Which brings us to …

Unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence

I first came across the Hierarchy of Competence model in management training, many years ago, and I’ve since encountered the related Dunning–Kruger effect, which adds the idea that, to paraphrase heavily, in areas where we don’t realise what we don’t know, we are more likely to think we know rather more about it than we actually do.

Although it’s often presented now as a pyramid, when I first came across the Hierarchy of Competence model, it was shown as a staircase.

Competence Staircase

Unconscious incompetence is a happy place – you don’t know much, and you don’t realise just how little you know.

Conscious incompetence is a less happy place, but it’s a place of growth – you’re alerted to the fact that the thing you’re learning is actually bigger than you thought. Hopefully, though, it’s also an exciting place to be as you start to explore your new skills and milieu.

Conscious competence isn’t the happiest of places, either, but things are improving – you’re aware of how much you need to practise, and how much more there is to learn, but you’re getting used to wielding your skills and seeing results. It’s still all a bit of an effort, though.

Unconscious competence is great – you’re just getting on with the job and doing it well.

However, don’t think that this unconscious competence is the end of your learning journey. It does take some effort to stay there, or you’ll find yourself tumbling down the stairs as the landscape changes around you. That’s your cue to undertake CPD – emphasis on the C.

About Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford is the author of the CIEP guide Going Solo, now in its second edition. She went solo with her own freelance copyediting business, Apt Words, in March 2007 and specialises in scholarly humanities and social sciences.

 

 

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 cottonbro studio, woman writing in a notebook by RF._.studio, love to learn by Tim Mossholder, all on Pexels.

Posted by Eleanor Smith, blog assistant.

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

Talking tech: Note-taking

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A key part of any training and CPD we undertake is taking notes that we can look back on for reference. But which is best: good old pen and paper, or modern apps? Andy Coulson contrasts and compares.

I am an unashamed paper note-taker. There is something about using paper and a pen or pencil that just feels better. I think the physical action of writing is a part of it: research in education and psychology suggests there is a link between handwriting and memory formation. There is certainly research around the cognitive benefits of handwritten note-taking (for example, Mueller and Oppenheimer’s ‘The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking’). I’ve tried various digital solutions and they just don’t quite cut it for me, but they might be preferred by some.

Why make notes?

Note-taking is a key study skill students use to record key information about a topic and create something they can then review and learn from. Many university websites offer good note-taking guides, for example the University of Reading and the Open University. Cornell University goes a step further and has its own note-taking system, summarised here.

All these have a few things in common: notes are short-form text, summarising key points to act as reminders; they should ask or stimulate questions about the topic; and they should allow the student to accurately review the material later.

Paper notes: The pros and cons

I think one of the things that I like about paper notes is that they don’t have to have a fixed structure: if they capture the key information in a way that allows you to understand and recall it, then they work. Handwritten notes can include marking up or annotating printouts (for example, with a highlighter or marginal notes); creating a structured outline using nested bullets, diagrams, tables and graphs, and mind maps or spider diagrams; or mostly graphical approaches like Sketchnotes. If you are anything like me, your notes end up with a mix of different things – sometimes a doodle or sketch catches an idea, and sometimes words are enough.

While handwritten notes have an advantage in helping us to understand and remember what we are learning, organising them can be more difficult. The more formal and structured systems, such as Cornell’s, encourage you to review and rewrite notes to help understand and retain the information. Using paper this is a slow job, but again it is all helping the information sink into your brain – it is a part of the learning process. By contrast, we have got used to storing everything and quickly searching for it with reasonable accuracy in the digital world. So, do the digital alternatives offer us a real advantage by managing the organisation?

Handwriting: note-taking

The digital app alternatives

Three popular digital note-taking apps are Microsoft’s OneNote, Google Keep and Evernote. The first two are freely available with a Windows, Office or a Google account. Evernote has a feature-limited free version, and paid versions with varying degrees of sophistication. All three of them also have mobile apps that link to the desktop or web app, allowing you to sync your notes across devices. I’ve used both Evernote and OneNote and they are both very comprehensive programs. They do slightly different jobs, but there is a big crossover in the middle.

Evernote is particularly good at grabbing content from sources such as web pages and, with a paid plan, you can add markup to these. Information is organised as pages, referred to as ‘notes’, that can be grouped in notebooks and linked. When you create notes there are a lot of templates you can use, including a Cornell Notes-specific one. In a note, you can add text or images, and a wide variety of other material. The editing screen is quite similar to Word or Google Docs, with material added in a linear up/down fashion as you would in Word. There are also features to create checklists and a link to Google Calendar, allowing Evernote to work as a capable task manager as well as a note manager.

OneNote supports most of the same features as Evernote. One big difference is the much more freeform way that you can add things to a note (or ‘section’ in OneNote terminology) where blocks of text or images are not fixed in a linear flow like they are in Word. For example, when you add text to a page, say a paragraph or bullet list, you add it as a box. These boxes can be moved around on the page in relation to each other, making the structure of your notes very easy to reorganise. There are a lot of quick formatting options that help you to highlight and flag elements in the text, such as ‘tickable’ to-do list bullets, highlighted styles for definitions or things to remember for later, and icons for phone numbers or email addresses.

By contrast, Google Keep is a much simpler app and to my mind is more like a digital block of sticky notes. You create text notes with a more limited range of features, including embedding images. The clever bit is that you can add labels like those Gmail uses, to group and organise those notes.

Keyboard: note-taking

I think OneNote gets closest to the flexibility of handwritten notes, and I can imagine that with a tablet and stylus it gets even closer. However, I don’t think any of these quite replace the functionality and convenience of a pad and pen; for me, at least.

As I mentioned earlier, part of the learning process is to review and perhaps rewrite your notes. Perhaps a hybrid option is to treat that rewrite as a good point to digitise your notes, particularly if you want them to be digitally searchable in future.

A reMarkable solution?

There is one more technical solution that might offer the best of both worlds. The reMarkable tablet aims to provide a paper-like experience on a digital tablet. It incorporates handwriting recognition so handwritten text can be converted to computer text, allowing it to be searched. The reMarkable system uses a folder system, just like your PC or Mac, and can sync documents with popular file storage services like Google Drive. There is also a desktop program that allows you to access and organise all your notes on your PC or Mac. The downside is of course the cost (around £300), but it is comparable to a mid-range phone or tablet, and this could be a really useful tool for many people.

About Andy Coulson

Andy CoulsonAndy Coulson is a reformed engineer and primary teacher, and a Professional Member of the CIEP. He is a copyeditor and proofreader specialising in STEM subjects and odd formats like LaTeX.

 

 

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 Kelly Sikkema, handwriting by Eleni Koureas, computer keyboard by Sergi Kabrera on Unsplash.

Posted by Belinda Hodder, blog assistant.

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

What might the future of AI mean for editors and proofreaders?

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We asked five editors to give us their views on how they think AI might affect their work in the future (while acknowledging that none of them owns a crystal ball). Here are their thoughts…

Hazel BirdHazel Bird

Back in January, I wrote on The Wordstitch Blog that I don’t believe AI will ever replace human editors – and (spoiler alert) AI agreed with me. Nothing I’ve seen since then has changed my opinion.

I certainly think AI will have an impact by shifting how editors work. I suspect there will be a natural migration away from the less judgement-based work of ‘error checking’ towards the more nuanced, involved work of refining and enhancing text (although this doesn’t necessarily mean that I think traditional proofreaders will be out of a job; proofreading is about much more than ‘error checking’ and requires intensely refined judgement at a point in the editorial workflow where the scope for changes is often very limited).

Overall, in the long term I believe AI will have a positive (or at worst neutral) effect on our work. I believe it will do this by allowing us to be more efficient and thereby freeing us up to provide more of the gloriously messy human mix of spontaneity and personal experience that leads to great creative collaborations (remember: ChatGPT et al. cannot truly create; all they can do is predict based on what they have learned from text that already exists).

My view is that the most important thing for us to do as editors is to educate ourselves about AI. If you’re like me, reading about its new (and ever-increasing) capabilities involves a lot of mental flinching. But it’s important to set aside this fear and learn how to work with AI. If we ignore its possibilities, we only increase our chances of being replaced. In contrast, if we make it a part of our team, we might just gain a whole new lease of life in our respective businesses. We might be able to focus more on the meaningful editing we love, supported by our very own AI-powered editorial assistant.

Most of all I believe that, when it comes to the quintessentially human activity of communication, ultimately humans will always prefer to work with other humans.

Sue LittlefordSue Littleford

AI reminds me of the early days of Covid. We all know we’re facing something big – so big it may even be an existential threat (especially for editorial professionals) – and so we all want answers, but those answers simply don’t exist, yet. We have to wait for things to unfold, but as we’re so closely affected, we’re grappling at the margins of knowledge and speculation to try to get ahead of the curve.

My own view is that AI as an editing tool is, at present, pretty poor in my niche (scholarly humanities and social sciences). At present. As I write, the news has come that ChatGPT can now access the internet. Not great – it’s a move from inventing ‘facts’ to melding together an almighty mess, as it still won’t be able to distinguish between fake news, error, unfounded opinion and truth. People can’t! I imagine it will improve quickly but not so far as to replace us editors. Computers were, and are, pretty dumb things and language is a hugely complex thing to codify. The learning they do through AI is just following patterns – but who knows what trawling the internet will add to their output? Regulation will be essential.

However, AI bots will help unconfident writers, for whom getting a simple message across simply and clearly is important, rather than literary style. I suspect they’ll be better at utilitarian language than at artistry. I also suspect there’ll be a rise in mediocre writing, as people accept AI’s input without the ability to judge it for themselves and be selective.

Accordingly, I’m ensuring my marketing efforts remain focused on the quality end of the client base, targeting people and organisations who understand that AI isn’t an easy, cheap replacement for the human mind.

I’ll be asking clients about their AI policies and thinking about what additional clauses to include in my own T&Cs.

John IngamellsJohn Ingamells

At the CIEP conference, a colleague said that he had experimented with ChatGPT.

His conclusion was that it was ‘good, but not great’. This immediately brought to mind the instruction I well remember from my first proofreading course – the idea of learning when things are ‘good enough’. We would all love to produce perfect work every time. But often budgets and time constraints lead us to that ‘good enough’ conclusion.

It struck me that this could well be the niche that AI fills for the foreseeable future. The polished prose of literary fiction, the pinpoint accuracy needed in legal and commercial material – these are things that will probably be beyond AI for some time to come. But the world of ‘good enough’ is surely there for the taking. So much content nowadays is produced to tight deadlines and is only expected to have a short shelf life. Being able to get something usable far more quickly is bound to be attractive to a lot of people. How much of that sort of material is currently being put through editors and proofreaders is open to debate. So the impact on our profession may not be as bad as some fear. But the need for us all to demonstrate the value of our work and how it is worth paying for will only increase. Perhaps on our websites we now don’t just need a ‘Services I offer’ tab, but a ‘Services I offer that AI can’t’ tab as well!

a human hand touches a robot hand, mimicking Michelangelo

Erin BrennerErin Brenner

I run Right Touch Editing, an agency primarily serving small and mid-sized organisations. Our clients produce reports, marketing materials, and similar business-related copy, and they generally don’t have devoted writers on staff. Many projects are written collectively by staffers who have a lot of other tasks to do every day.

It’s easy to see how AI tools can help them get these projects done. They can brainstorm, outline, and write rough drafts quickly with the right prompts. And the output can be helpful – up to a point. We’ve all heard stories of AI tools making up details. They’re mediocre at best when it comes to writing and editing, even with well-written prompts.

But this is where my team and I come in. As the writing experts for our clients, we’re key to understanding these tools and using them successfully. We can help clients use these time-saving tools to get the results they’re looking for. I see us performing heavier-than-usual edits on copy that AI has helped produce. Being aware of its weaknesses means we can edit for those weaknesses. For those clients with a little more budget, we can work directly with an AI tool to develop the content and then revise and edit it to a professional standard.

These tools aren’t going away. Of course, we need to be wary, ensuring that we’re using them ethically, but we can’t ignore them. By becoming the experts on how and when to use AI tools, we can guide our clients to better, more ethical usage.

Andrew HodgesAndrew Hodges

Overall, I’m excited about generative AI’s possibilities but angry at how authors’ and artists’ work (including my own book) has been exploited in datasets to train them. Better protections for authors must be established. But generative AI (when developed responsibly) could save lots of time on copyedits by creating macros and doing jobs like reference list formatting etc.

In the medium term, I expect a small drop in the number of human editors needed, as more work will involve reviewing AI-assisted edits. I expect this will happen quickly for proofreading of PDF proofs.

Since I set up my business, I’ve been shifting to doing more developmental editing and coaching and less line editing and copyediting. I guess editorial consulting will be less directly affected by generative AI than, say, proofreading, light copyediting or translation. Whatever kind of editing people do, I expect editors who include human connection in their workflows will continue to flourish. Electric massage chairs didn’t make regular massages obsolete.

The most exciting aspect for me is how these new technologies may change our expectations. This reminds me of Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s argument about how the invention of labour-saving household devices like the vacuum cleaner didn’t ultimately end up saving people time. Alongside the new inventions came raised standards and expectations of cleanliness. When new technologies emerge, there’s a social reconfiguring and a new balance is found. This is happening with generative AI: in the space of a few months, it became obvious when ChatGPT had been used to write a blog or social media post, and I started interpreting a smooth, correctly spelled post or email with that signature ChatGPT voice differently. Who knows, there could be an increased focus on solving structural problems with manuscripts if generative AI takes care of some of the sentence-level issues. It’s impossible to predict!

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: artificial brain by geralt on Pixabay; human and robot hands by cottonbro on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Definite articles: AI

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Welcome to ‘Definite articles’, our pick of recent editing-related internet content, most of which are definitely articles. This time, our theme is the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on editing and proofreading. It’s a hot topic of conversation among editorial professionals, which is why some of the links in this article were sourced from a CIEP forum thread about ChatGPT. Thank you to the CIEP members who shared them.

Because nothing related to discussions about AI can be guaranteed a long shelf life, you should know that this edition of ‘Definite articles’ was put together at the beginning of June 2023. It covers:

  • What’s been happening?
  • What can AI actually do?
  • How can editorial professionals move forward with AI?

What’s been happening?

On 30 November 2022, the AI chatbot ChatGPT was released by OpenAI. Since then, people who work with words, who include editors, proofreaders and writers, have had the unnerving feeling that the fundamentals of what they do might change, at least in some areas. If you haven’t been keeping a close eye on events, Forbes has written a short history of ChatGPT and two professors have summarised some of the implications of ChatGPT in usefully easy-to-understand terms. You can get an overview of Microsoft’s Copilot, an AI assistance feature being launched this summer, from CNN and Microsoft itself.

As well as the obvious nervousness about whether AI would replace various categories of worker, concerns were quickly raised about the effects of AI on assessing student work and what AI might mean for copyright.

By late spring 2023, loud noises were being made about regulation of AI. As lawmakers in Europe worked on an AI Act, workers in the UK reported that they would like to see the regulation of generative AI technologies.

It’s a subject that’s currently being written and thought about on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But, in practice, and at this point in time, what can AI actually do?

What can AI actually do?

If you didn’t catch Harriet Power’s CIEP blog, ‘ChatGPT versus a human editor’, it’s an enlightening and entertaining read that went down well with our social media followers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Harriet instructed ChatGPT to take a proofreading test, write a blog post, and edit some fiction and a set of references. In the proofreading and editing tasks, it did ‘pretty well’ and was impressive in simplifying a fiction passage while keeping its main points. It also wrote a serviceable blog draft.

The two main problems Harriet noticed in the technology were a distinct lack of sparkle in ChatGPT’s writing and editing, and its ‘tendency to “hallucinate”: it’s very good at making stuff up with complete confidence’. (This tendency was also written about by Susanne Dunlap for Jane Friedman’s website, in an article called ‘Using ChatGPT for book research? Take exceeding care’.) Weighing up her test run, Harriet concluded:

ChatGPT apparently struggles to remain coherent when responding to much longer pieces of text (like whole books). It isn’t always factually accurate: you can’t entirely trust anything it’s saying. I can’t imagine how it’d make a good development editor, or how it’d handle raising complex, sensitive author queries. It can’t track changes well. It can’t think like a human, even when it can convincingly sound like one.

However, Harriet added the caveat that in her view it may be ‘years or even months’ before ChatGPT might be able to start competing with human editors. So, how should we respond to that?

computer screen showing OpenAI logo and text

How can editorial professionals move forward with AI?

Perhaps there’s no choice but to look at the possible upsides of the AI debate. Anne McCarthy for the New York Book Forum starts us off in ‘The potential impact of AI on editing and proofreading’ by reminding us that lightbulbs and the ‘horseless carriage’ inspired dire predictions in their day. She concludes: ‘Books always have (and always will) require a human touch: it’s what draws us readers to them.’

Amanda Goldrick-Jones, in an article for the Editors Toronto blog called ‘ChatGPT and the role of editors’, offers some wise and hopeful advice: there’s a point at which we, as editorial professionals, have to trust ourselves.

If anyone is well-positioned to explore and critique the possibilities and challenges of AI-generated writing, it’s an editor … So, as with other communication technologies, editors must self-educate about its affordances, propose clear ethical boundaries, and critically engage with its limitations. It’s a tool, not our robot overlord.

Part of this consideration and engagement is understanding AI’s risks, and Michelle Garrett lays these out very effectively in a blog post from March, ‘The realities of using ChatGPT to write for you – what to consider when it comes to legalities, reputation, search and originality’.

Moving one step further, a Q&A with writer Elisa Lorello on Jane Friedman’s website talks about actively using ChatGPT to become ‘creatively fertile’. Lorello testifies that when she started using the technology in earnest, ‘It’s like I suddenly gained an edge in productivity, organization, and creativity’.

And finally, Alex Hern in The Guardian described what happened when he spent a week using ChatGPT to enhance his leisure activities. If you’re not ready to use AI at work, perhaps you could at least get a couple of recipes out of it.

With thanks to the users of the CIEP’s forums for the links they shared in recent discussions.

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: robot hand by Tara Winstead on Pexels; OpenAI screen by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Curriculum focus: The publishing process

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In this regular feature for The Edit, former training director Jane Moody highlights an area of the CIEP’s Curriculum for professional development. This month’s article is packed with useful information to expand your knowledge of the publishing process, from digital to bookbinding!

Publishing is covered in several areas of the curriculum. I haven’t included editorial processes in the list below, but rather concentrated on those aspects of publishing that are not covered by our core skills. These areas are valuable for a competent copyeditor or proofreader to know about. Most topics fall into Domain 2 Editorial knowledge and practice, but I have included one from Domain 1 Working as a professional.

KNOWLEDGE CRITERIAEDITORIAL COMPETENCIES, PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ATTITUDES
1.1.1 Role and responsibilities of an editor/proofreader within a publishing team• Understands publishing schedules and budgets, and how they interact
• Is aware of the responsibilities of an editor to stakeholders and of the editor as an intermediary
• Understands the place of an editor/proofreader in the publishing process
• Is aware of own role within the team and able to work as part of a team
2.1.1 Workflows• Understands the critical stages involved in any publishing process
• Understands common publishing terminology
2.1.2 Schedules and budgeting• Understands the importance of scheduling and budgeting within any publishing process
• Understands the influence of the schedule/budget on the scope of editing/proofreading
2.1.4 Production processes• Understands the roles and responsibilities of a production team
• Understands the meaning and use of common production terminology
• Understands the stages of the production process (eg prepress, print/electronic production)
2.1.5 Design, typography and typesetting• Understands the meaning and application of common typographical terminology
• Is aware of different fonts, typefaces and their uses
• Recognises typographical characteristics: measures, alignment, spacing
• Understands word and character spacing, leading, indentation, non-breaking spaces, hyphens
• Understands layout, typesetting and working with a typesetter (specification, layout, revises, running sheets)
2.1.6 Printing and finishing• Understands the requirements for different printing processes (colour, paper types, sizes, file sizes, resolution)
• Is aware of different printing processes (eg litho, offset, digital, print-on-demand)
• Is aware of different print finishes (eg sealer, varnishes, laminates)
• Is aware of different binding methods (saddle-stitched, perfect binding, sewn, case binding, self-cover)
2.1.7 eBook formats• Is aware of different ebook formats (eg EPUB, Amazon AZW, PDF, TXT, MOBI
• Has a basic understanding of which format to choose in different situations
2.1.11 Different models of publishing• Is aware of the different types of publishing models (eg traditional publishing, businesses and other clients, self-publishing)
• Understands the different financial models of publishing (eg traditional publisher pays, author pays, open access, hybrid models, self-publishing)

Terminology

Before you can understand the processes, perhaps you might need some explanation of the many jargon terms used in the business. You can, of course, use the CIEP Glossary. Other terms might be found in HarperCollins’ Glossary of Book Publishing Terms. For a lighter look at publishing terms, try Tom’s Glossary of Publishing Terms (in which the term copyediting is defined as ‘A phase of publishing that requires little or no budget, is considered of slight importance, and may be omitted at the option of the publisher’, copyright as ‘A concept invented by lawyers as a hedge against unemployment’, and chapter-by-chapter breakdown as ‘the progressive deterioration of a copyeditor who is on a tight deadline’!)

Some slightly more technical terms can be found in Desktop Publishing Terminology – The Complete Guide (2022) from Kwintessential.

Process and workflow

Understanding the publishing process is essential for copyeditors and proofreaders. However, understanding is complicated because there is no one process – workflows vary from publisher to publisher and with different types of publishing. There are several CIEP courses listed in the curriculum and other helpful resources. The CIEP fact sheet The publishing workflow is a good starting point.

Courses are thin on the ground, but the Publishing Training Centre runs an e-learning module An Introduction to publishing, which is described as being for ‘newcomers to publishing who wish to gain a grounding in the structure of the publishing industry today, along with its key processes and functions’.

Books include:

  • Inside Book Publishing, 6th edn by Giles Clark and Angus Phillips (Routledge, 2019), ‘the classic introduction to the book publishing industry’.
  • Handbook for Academic Authors: How to Navigate the Publishing Process, 6th edn by Beth Luey (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Here, I’m looking further to find information in the online environment:

  • The Publishers Association is a good source of information. Their webpage ‘How publishing works’ gives detailed information and includes personal accounts of working in the role (although when I looked, there were several broken links).
  • Publishing Talk aims to help new and emerging authors write, publish and sell books. Jon Reed has written a blog, ‘The book publishing process – an 8-step guide’.
  • Individual publishers may offer guidance to authors about their particular processes, which can also be useful to editors, particularly if they include timings. See, for example, the Bloomsbury guide to the publishing process. The timings quoted there might raise a few eyebrows! HarperCollins personalises the process, with individuals describing their roles in the company.
  • Bill Swainson has written a blog, ‘The Publishing Process’ (originally written 27 July 2012 and updated 20 January 2021), for the Bloomsbury Writers & Artists newsletter.

close-up of a printing machine

For a different kind of publishing process for non-fiction, read the IntechOpen article ‘Publishing Process Steps and Descriptions’. IntechOpen is an open-access publisher. This model of publishing charges a fee to the author or the author’s institution (£850 per chapter) and the subsequent (online) publication is made freely available to readers.

ALLi provides information on the self-publishing process in a blog by Orna Ross, ALLi Director: ‘What Is Publishing? The Seven Processes of Book Publishing’. Also describing the self-publishing process is a guide from the Writers’ Guild, published in 2022, Self-publishing: A step-by-step guide for authors.

Other web resources include an ‘Academic Publishing Toolkit’ for potential authors from the University of Manchester Library. The University of Manchester Library has a number of helpful webpages on the publishing process. ‘The publishing process – what to expect’ includes flowcharts for each type of publication. These webpages give information about typical stages, milestones and timescales that you’re likely to encounter when publishing a journal article or a monograph. 

What all these useful articles don’t say, in their attempts to set out a clear process, is that some (sometimes all) these processes can happen in different orders, or all at once. Often, the design is adapted from a previous publication, so is already set before the editorial processes start. Sometimes publication is driven by the market, and marketing may be started before a word is written or edited. Publishers’ marketing departments are often over-enthusiastic about the speed of production of their forthcoming titles! How often have you ordered an advertised book only to be told (often several times) that the publication date has been put back?

Ebooks

Anum Hussain’s blog post ‘How to Create an Ebook From Start to Finish’ (11 August 2022) is a useful introduction, as is ‘How to Make an Ebook in 5 Steps Without Breaking a Sweat’ from Designrr.

‘Everything Self-Publishers Need to Know About Ebook Formats’ (8 November 2021) gives a run-down of the different formats available and when (and how not) to use them.

Printing and binding

You can read about the printing and binding processes, but it is hard to imagine what it’s really like without seeing it. YouTube is a happy hunting ground for videos – once you start to look, you will find many helpful videos that explain the process or just give you a feel for what it is like. Here are just a few.

If you don’t know much about the printing process, watch Gorham Print’s YouTube video, which shows the process in a small printing company. Watch the same basic process on a giant scale in a Korean company, Mega Process (or this one: Factory Monster). I can tell you from personal experience that these factories really are that noisy, even without the music! This clip is more explanatory: ‘How It’s Made Books’. I’d recommend watching them both: the Korean ones will give you a better feel for the real action, but the explanations in the latter are very helpful.

For a slightly different approach, watch Amazon Books’ ‘make on demand’ process. The sound quality is occasionally quite poor, which is a shame, but it’s worth watching to see the POD (print-on-demand) process.

Newspaper printing is quite specialised. Watch the New York Times (in 2019) or The Times (in 2022) being printed.

Offset litho printing is described in a video from Solopress and the sheetfed system in one from Sappi (this one has subtitles). Express Cards’ simple animations make the whole process a lot easier to understand.

Digital printing is explained in a video from Sappi and from Sticker Mountain (Indigo printing).

The Telegraph has a video from 2012: ‘Birth of a Book: how a hardback book is made’ – there will still be companies in existence who use the human touch, but probably not many like this one. For an even more esoteric skill set, watch ‘The Chelsea Bindery Show the Processes of Book Binding’ – once upon a time, most books were bound like this. It’s more like this now: ‘Book binding (Muller Martini Monostar)’.

About Jane Moody

Jane has worked with books for all her working life (which is rather more years than she cares to admit), having started life as a librarian. She started a freelance editing business while at home with her two children, which she maintained for 15 years before going back into full-time employment as head of publishing for a medical Royal College.

Now retired, she has resurrected her editorial business, but has less time for work these days as she spends much time with her four grandchildren and in her garden.

 

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: letterpress by Jirreaux; printing machine by Dengmert; both on Pixabay.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Editing fiction: Romance

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In this post, Maya Berger looks at how fiction editors can help authors to create romantic relationships that feel true to the rest of the story.

Content warning: general mention of non-consensual relationships and dynamics in fiction (no specific examples).

Characters in a work of fiction are complex creatures. They have personalities, back stories, motivations, physical appearances, schedules and interpersonal relationships – and a line editor needs to make sure that all these details are consistent, realistic within the fictional universe and engaging for the reader throughout the story. Add a romance into the mix, and now the editor also has to consider things like characters’ attitudes towards dating, sex and gender roles in relationships; whether the character becomes unrecognisable once they’re in love; and representations of consent.

This post will look at some of the major character considerations for editors to keep in mind when line editing romance and intimacy in fiction. It offers tips on ensuring that a story’s romantic elements preserve character consistency, framing and inclusivity, and handling consent issues sensitively.

Meet the lovebirds

When we’re line editing fiction in general, we look for well-developed, consistent characters with clear motivations, relatable thoughts and actions, and realistic and satisfying character arcs. And we can apply the same criteria to romantic character arcs and intimate dynamics.

What does the story say about the characters in a couple (or throuple, or other polyamorous configuration, as the case may be)? If your author has supplied character sketches, you’ve got a head start on this; otherwise, as you edit, note details like:

  • what qualities they value in their loved ones
  • how they react to stress
  • how highly they prioritise their career
  • how they like to spend their free time

and ask yourself whether the characters show these traits in their romantic interactions.

Then, look at what the romance contributes to the reader’s engagement with the characters. Does a romantic dynamic add to character development and reveal hidden truths about a character? Does a character’s crush motivate them to perform the actions that drive the plot forward, or does a character’s behaviour within a romantic relationship reveal an ulterior motive of theirs? If the answer to all these questions is ‘no’, or if the romantic dynamics feel out of place or tacked on just to give a character something to do, query this with the author.

There are often little additions you can suggest to turn an isolated intimate moment into a scene that adds depth to the story. For example:

Before: ‘She kissed Ilana, losing herself in the sensations.’

After: ‘She kissed Ilana, losing herself in pleasurable sensations for the first time since the war began.’

Before: ‘If the heart-stoppingly beautiful barista was working today, he would finally ask them out.’

After: ‘If the heart-stoppingly beautiful barista was working today, he would finally ask them out – he was determined that his infernal stutter would not get in the way this time.’

Editing romance for character consistency

Be on the lookout for unexplained inconsistencies between how a character acts, speaks and thinks in romantic and non-romantic scenes. If you find any, ask the author about them.

Here’s an example of a query with suggestions for addressing such a character inconsistency:

Character A’s flirting is playful, but in all his interactions with his friends and siblings he is intense and pretentious, and readers may find the difference jarring. If there is something about Character B that brings out Character A’s hidden playful side, please make this clearer in the text.

I’d also suggest having Character A notice the difference in himself and react to it: is he ashamed to be letting his guard down around Character B, for example, or does it make him appreciate Character B all the more? Alternatively, you could add some light-heartedness to Character A’s other relationships or make him more intense with his lover so that he’s still recognisable in every scene.

With this query, I’ve prompted the author to consider how they intended to portray Character A in the context of their romantic and other relationships, and I’ve given them some corresponding options for improving the text.

Editing romance for consent orientation

The Pervocracy states that, ‘A consent culture is one in which the prevailing narrative of sex – in fact, of human interaction – is centred around mutual consent.’

When examining the romantic dynamics in a story, try to establish the story’s consent orientation – its underlying attitudes and assumptions about the seeking and granting of consent. For example, the author may have written dialogue with a joke about following someone home that they intended as flirty banter but that comes across like a lyric from ‘Every Breath You Take’. In a case like this, you can suggest having the character sheepishly realise what they’ve implied and apologise for being creepy, framing the character as a villain and having other characters react negatively to the joke, or replace the joke with a different funny line that doesn’t rely on making someone feel unsafe for its punchline.

The vocabulary and tone play a big part in setting a story’s consent orientation: for example, is the author trying to create an atmosphere that is inappropriately erotic when a character is showing reluctance or distress? And ask yourself which characters are portrayed sympathetically. The answers to these questions will help you determine the story’s position on consent and whether the author is being exploitative, not just in terms of the romantic elements of the story but with all the story’s interpersonal relationships.

As an editor, you may encounter scenes of non-consensual or traumatic relationships and acts, particularly in crime fiction, horror and historical fiction. Sometimes these scenes will be integral to a character’s story or establishing historical accuracy and realism, but you can always choose not to take on a project with these elements or step away from a project that you’re uneasy about.

When editing a story with non-consensual elements, I suggest advising the author to add a content-warning disclaimer in the front matter of the story to help readers know what to expect, if it’s not already clear from the cover, the blurb or the genre and marketing of the book.

Even though the inclusion of a non-consensual scenario might be necessary in a story, that doesn’t give an author carte blanche to glorify coercion or violence in an intimate relationship, and an editor can suggest rewording or reframing a character or scene to avoid glamourising these things the same way that we might for murder, fraud or any other crime. This brings us on to …

Editing romance for character framing

As well as the non-consensual dynamics mentioned above, even within the realm of consensual relationships there is potential for misogyny, jokes in poor taste, gender essentialism and other content that can alienate readers. Again, note the characters’ reactions to each other and to what is happening, as well as how the narrator treats the characters. Do the sympathetic characters’ actions and dialogue support the framing of them as swoon-worthy?

For example, if Character D describes Character C as ‘the woman of my dreams’, but this ‘dream woman’ constantly insults and belittles Character D in front of their friends, do the narration and the other characters also see Character C positively? If they do, you can raise a query with the author, along the lines of:

Character C insulted Character D in front of their friends seven times in the previous two chapters. This doesn’t seem consistent with the description of her as ‘the woman of my dreams’, with how well liked she is within their friend group, or with the narration’s framing of her as a sympathetic character.

To avoid putting off readers, consider having fewer instances of Character C insulting her partner and/or having Character C apologise and make good-faith efforts to change. Alternatively, you can reframe Character C’s actions by giving them consequences within the story, such as having Character D or their friends call out Character C and telling her that her behaviour is unacceptable.

two people with tattoos on their arms hold hands

Editing romance for inclusivity

The traditional male romantic leads in Western fiction (tall, white, non-disabled, young, cisgender men who were sexually attracted to women) and their female counterparts (cisgender, young, non-disabled, white, and seeking a monogamous romantic and sexual relationship with a man) leave a lot of readers unrepresented.

Thankfully, as many fiction genres have become more diverse, so have the romances within them. And as editors, we can encourage authors to include positive representation in their stories by moving beyond stereotypes or subverting them.

When characters with romantic storylines are from racialised or sexual-minority backgrounds, or when they are older characters or characters with impairments, illnesses or neurodivergence, challenge any negative stereotyping around things like:

  • their capacity to feel and express desire
  • their attitudes towards casual sex, having and raising children, and LGBTQIA+ relationships
  • the gender roles they occupy.

Conclusion

  • Get to know the characters with romantic storylines, and note whether they show the same traits in their romantic interactions and in the rest of the story.
  • Establish the story’s consent orientation and pay attention to how the dialogue, tone and character framing reinforce it.
  • Encourage positive representation of diverse romances and challenge negative stereotyping.

Further reading

To find out more about integrating romance into a work of fiction, check out Candida Bradford’s blog post on writing a romantic subplot, TV Tropes’ Romantic Plot Tumor page, this blog post from KJ Charles on consent in sex scenes and my blog post on how to write more diverse sexuality in fiction.

About Maya Berger

Maya Berger is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading. She specialises in editing and proofreading erotic and romantic fiction, speculative fiction, and academic texts in the humanities and social sciences, and she appeared as a guest on The Editing Podcast speaking about editing erotica. Maya also launched The Editor’s Affairs (TEA) in 2020 to help fellow freelance editors manage their business affairs. She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

 

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: heart and books by Kaboompics, couple by a lake by Adam Kontor, couple holding hands by Marcelo Chagas, all on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Editing fiction: Dialogue

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In the first of a series of posts on editing fiction, Katherine Kirk looks at how editors can help authors create engaging dialogue that really brings individual characters to life.

Style manuals like New Hart’s Rules and guides like The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction can help editors know exactly how to punctuate an interruption or how to capitalise a stammered first name, but there’s more to great conversations than the lengths of their pauses. Sometimes we need to dig a little deeper into them, and at a line editing level, this can start to feel a bit abstract. It can be hard to explain to an author how to add more subtext to a snippet of dialogue: ‘You need to not write more things not being said’ sounds like some kind of magic trick.

This post will look at how great dialogue starts with the character, it changes depending on whom they’re talking to, and how editors can add or subtract to bring those voices out.

Start with the character

If a novel’s characters aren’t distinct enough from each other, their voices will blur into one and the reader will soon forget who’s who and why they should care.

A strong character voice comes from who that character is at their core. Their background, their beliefs and their agenda all play into how they speak. If you’re working directly with an author, you can ask them probing questions like: ‘These characters live in the US but are originally from the UK, having moved there when the children were quite young. How much of their British accent has remained a decade later?’

The answers will inform word choice and what sort of rhythm the characters use when they speak. For that reason, I usually don’t wait until the end of my main pass through a manuscript to ask the author these types of questions, but send them along as soon as possible.

If you’re not working directly with an author, then you can only work with the information they’ve given you in the manuscript itself, which is why it’s a great idea to read the whole thing first, before editing. In your style sheet, make notes not only of the concrete details like a character’s age or hair colour but also about characteristics that could inform the way they speak. If they have a pet phrase or verbal habit, see if it’s used consistently. Does their spoken voice match their inner voice? Is there a good reason for it not to?

Paying attention to these aspects of the character’s voice can help you to pick up on where characters might start sounding the same. For instance, what maybe started as a verbal habit for one character might have been applied to multiple characters, nullifying its effect. Or it may be an author habit instead. If an author is relying only on these verbal habits to distinguish characters from each other, they might be overused and feel repetitive. Authors of YA may be tempted to have their teen characters say ‘like’ in every sentence; while this might reflect how some real-life teens speak, overuse may irritate readers. Don’t be afraid to suggest removing some of them.

Pet phrases aren’t the only tool we can use to make the voices more distinct. Some other options might be:

  • talking around the issue vs getting to the point (look at sentence structure here)
  • utilising gratuitously verbose lexical terms vs using short, simple words
  • airily drifting in and out of a conversation with pauses and ellipses vs jumping in and thrashing about with dashes
  • popping in slang vs using very ‘correct’ formal language. Regional slang, age-specific slang, and industry jargon can all tell us a lot about a person, and about a person who refuses to use it.

The roles we play

I am her mother, his wife, her teacher, his naughty little secret, their ally, your worst nightmare, and that will affect how I speak to you. People who know each other well develop a kind of shorthand and can read each other’s subtext better, so characters who are close might not need to have every question answered. I often find that deleting the answer to the question (especially a yes or no) loses nothing. The reader can infer the answer from context and how the conversation proceeds, and it feels snappier and more vivid.

Here’s an example with every question answered. Note how slow it feels.

‘Where is he?’ I asked, reaching for the frozen peas.

‘He’s out back, I think.’ She turned away, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘I’m not hungry. The peas are for the swelling.’ I pressed them to my throbbing cheek. ‘Did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t tell him,’ she said. ‘I knew it would make him angry.’

‘Because you know how he gets,’ I muttered.

‘Yes. I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I didn’t tell him.’

When the characters are family, as these two might be, then much of this does not need to be said. Cutting text out can turn it into subtext, making the conversation feel less stodgy and more suspenseful. If there’s a tag along with an action beat, we can probably take the tag out too and use the action beat as attribution on its own. Where it’s clear who’s speaking, we don’t need any attribution at all. Here’s an extreme example of how it might be pared down:

‘Where is he?’ I reached for the frozen peas.

‘Out back.’ She turned away. ‘I didn’t tell him.’

‘You know how he gets.’

‘I know.’

What if they were acquaintances?

‘Where is he?’ I reached for the frozen peas.

‘He’s out back. Working in the shop, I think.’ She turned away. ‘Did he do that?’

‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘I might have. But it wasn’t me that told him.’

Here, they need to give each other a little more information, and the shared knowledge of years of history is gone. They speak in slightly more complete sentences and give each other more grace.

How the characters negotiate the control of the conversation (or turn-taking) could also show their intimacy. It might change over the course of a novel. A meet-cute might have our lovers verbally stumbling over and butting up against each other, but by the end of their love story, they’re listening to each other, reading each other’s subtext and finishing each other’s sentences. Or it could go the other way, with a couple who used to be able to read each other’s signals now finding they’re no longer fluent in their shared unspoken language, and they might misread it.

What if our two characters dislike each other, and one of them is a little tougher? Let’s have the tough lady interrupt more and use more colloquial language, and contrast it with the other by having more hedging and hesitation. We might need to add an action beat to make the character more vivid.

‘Where is he?’ I reached for the frozen peas.

She spat out an apple seed. ‘I ain’t his keeper.’

‘Did you tell him? That I–’

‘Course not.’

‘It’s just that, well, I wouldn’t blame you if you had.’

‘Well I didn’t.’

Their relationship affects the words they choose to say, the questions they dodge and the assumptions they make. Dialogue that fails to take these elements into account tends towards soulless conversation that is just furthering the plot, reacting to an event or revealing a secret.

How much can an editor change?

It tends to be easier to take things out than to add things in. Whatever we remove, the words that remain are still entirely the author’s. Luckily for us, authors tend to bloat dialogue rather than be too brief, so we usually just need to do some careful snipping. But sometimes the dialogue feels like it’s just scaffolding and it needs something more substantial.

When it comes to adding stuff in, editors are limited in what we can do. It’s not our job to write the book. But we could provide examples. My favourite trick is to mine the narrative for key phrases that ring with the character’s voice and move them into sleepy dialogue to wake it up. I might borrow a phrase from one speaker and give it to another, or flip who says what. That way I’m using the author’s own words to patch the hole rather than speaking for them. If there isn’t a handy phrase nearby, I’ll provide some examples in my best imitation of their voice and let the author choose.

If you’re asking them to add something, you must have a good reason for doing so, and be very clear in your directions. Be specific about what exactly needs to be added, why and where. Review their revisions to check they haven’t introduced errors. And remember that it’s not your book.

Summing it up

  • If you read a manuscript in full before you dive in, you can get to know the characters a little better.
  • Take note not only of what characters are but who they are, and how that affects their voice.
  • Make note of their relationships, and check if these relationships are reflected in their conversations.
  • Trim out the unnecessary padding and let the best parts of the dialogue shine without being smothered by redundant dialogue tags or awkward attempts to show dialect.
  • Be just as careful taking out as you are adding in, and don’t fix what ain’t broke. Ask more questions and respect the characters as much as you respect the author.

For more insight into making dialogue sparkle, I recommend Louise Harnby’s dialogue resources, this blog post by Emma Darwin, and Sophie Playle’s fabulous explanation of ‘As You Know, Bob’ dialogue (and how to avoid it).

About Katherine Kirk

Katherine Kirk is a fiction editor who has been described by clients as a hopeless semantic and their secret weapon. She offers line editing, copyediting and proofreading to indie authors and publishers of all fiction genres, and she particularly enjoys science fiction and fantasy.

 

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: speech bubbles by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels; couple by Samson Katt on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Flying solo: Editor education – an essential investment

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In this Flying solo column, Sue Littleford makes the case for why training and continuous professional development are vital for editors and proofreaders – considering their importance to CIEP members in particular.

Members of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) understand the emphasis put on training and the acquisition of the appropriate level of skills, as well as maintaining and expanding them through continuous professional development (CPD).

The CIEP distinguishes between core skills and editorial skills, core skills being about how to edit or proofread, and editorial skills being more about the context in which the editing or proofreading takes place and expanding your skillset.

But why this emphasis on training? It’s there in the curriculum for professional development and in the upgrading system (members should take a look at How to upgrade your CIEP membership, especially chapters 2, 3 and 11 for all members, and chapter 4, 5 or 6 depending on the grade you’re working towards). Training is all over the forums! Advanced Professional Members (APMs) are required to show their commitment to CPD, to stay current with best practice.

Simply put, we don’t know what we don’t know.

We don’t know if – while we’ve been nose to the grindstone – new tools, new standards, or new and better approaches to the work have been developed and are now circulating. Training allows us the time to look up and look around, and see what’s happening out there.

Training also gives our clients the confidence that we do actually know what we’re doing, which is invaluable to them and to us. Members in the Professional grades can take out an entry in the Directory of Editorial Services, and potential clients searching the Directory will have confidence that members who have achieved Professional membership or higher have the backing of solid training.

But surely, I hear some of you cry, I already know what I’m doing! English isn’t evolving so quickly I can’t keep up all by myself. I don’t need additional training – I’m learning on the job all the time. I don’t need formal training – I pick things up as I go!

I say again: we don’t know what we don’t know.

Going on training courses that challenge you to do better expands your abilities and your experience and gives imposter syndrome a biff on the nose. And, as workshop training starts to become available again in some places, there can be the chance to meet other editors and talk together. Just talking to other editors about their contexts can be a real eye-opener.

Sometimes an absolute gem of a tip gets mentioned in the margins of a course, off-topic but really useful to you. Learning isn’t restricted to the course outline.

Some people prefer to learn on their own. Well, that’s fine, so far as it goes; but, especially if you’re still building up your experience as an editor or a proofreader, how do you know you’re learning what you need to know? Are you learning in sufficient breadth, with perspective? Or are you just burrowing further into your own snug editorial world, unaware of what you can learn from outside that niche?

If so, you’re really restricting the kind of material you can work on competently and, in these ever-uncertain days, that may be somewhat counterproductive for your business and your financial health.

Equally, some people have learned on the job by being tutored or mentored by their boss – or just by ‘sitting with Nelly’ as we used to call it in the civil service. That’s fine too, but to upgrade you’ll also need to sit and pass the CIEP’s editorial test (page 34 of the upgrading guide and on the website). Again, the CIEP’s emphasis in the test is on across-the-board competence. Niche away in the jobs you choose to take on, but don’t become isolated and narrow in your approach to your professional practice.

Getting a good solid grounding in the fundamentals of editing under your belt (and keeping it current) gives you a great springboard for developing yourself and your business in the way you want.

One of the characteristics that unites good editors is our curiosity, along with our quest for new knowledge (and a headful of otherwise useless bits and bobs of general knowledge). The ability to know when something we’re editing sounds off is of great value to our clients.

Maintain that inquisitive approach.

A sign reading 'love to learn' points towards a figure walking along a road

Record-keeping

Regular readers will know what a fan I am of record-keeping. It’s no different with training, which is why the Going Solo toolkit (CIEP members only) has a spreadsheet on which to record the training you’ve already undertaken, and the training you’d like to take.

Listing out the training you’ve already taken will help you see where you have weaknesses, or where your training is out of date and ripe to be refreshed.

Keeping a note of training courses you fancy the look of – the spreadsheet has a handy column to keep a link to each one – will whet your appetite and enable you to see whether anything you’ve taken note of neatly plugs a hole or tops up your training in that area.

Consulting the curriculum for professional development will also help you check whether you’re getting a rounded education as an editor or a proofreader. Looking at that curriculum will open your eyes to what it is you didn’t know you didn’t know. Add topics to your wish list so you can be on the lookout for courses to fill the gaps.

And if you’re still working through the CIEP’s grades, the spreadsheet was developed with the input of the Admissions Panel. Collecting the evidence is easy and you don’t have to copy out your training all over again on the upgrade form.

Planning and budgeting

Training costs time and it costs money. If you’re still working through the CIEP grades, then you’ll want to set aside a training budget each year – in cash and in time. If you’re already an APM, then you’ll set aside a CPD budget each year.

But how much money? And how much time? This is where the curriculum, the requirements of the grade you’re aiming for, the direction you’re taking your business in and your wish list of training courses come together.

Using all the information you have recorded on courses taken, gaps in training and your wish list, you can prioritise which course(s) to take next. You can then ensure you can afford them and set aside the time available to do them justice.

I know some inveterate course-takers who have huge plans and then, when they come to tot up the total cost and the time commitment, have to move some courses they’d love to do into the next year – or the next two years. Well, it’s nice to have something to look forward to!

Tax implications

For UK taxpayers, training is an allowable business expense for the self-employed in some cases only. If you pay tax elsewhere, check your own jurisdiction on this.

In brief, in the UK, training is not an allowable business expense if it’s undertaken to enable you to start trading.

Nor is it an allowable business expense if it’s undertaken to enable you to move into a new area of business. Harsh but true.

Training is an allowable expense if it keeps you up to date in your skills and knowledge. Even HMRC likes CPD!

Take note that, as with all other allowable expenses, training costs are only allowable if they are incurred wholly for business purposes.

This is the advice on the GOV.UK website:

Training courses

You can claim allowable business expenses for training that helps you improve the skills and knowledge you use in your business (for example, refresher courses).

The training courses must be related to your business.

You cannot claim for training courses that help you:

      • start a new business
      • expand into new areas of business, including anything related to your current business [my emphasis].

It’s made very clear that not all training is allowable.

The technical bit is in HMRC’s Business Income Manual.

Takeaways

  • Training is a sound investment in yourself and your business, making you fit for purpose as an editor or a proofreader. It gives your clients confidence that you do actually know what you’re doing and will do it well. It also keeps you poised to move your business in a new direction if that’s something you want – or need – to do.
  • Autodidacticism can work well, but can also come across as less authoritative and clients may feel less confident about your offer. Training supplied by reputable providers enhances your profile and ensures you don’t get in a rut.
  • Learning on the job is also fine, but you will need to pass the CIEP’s online editorial test in order to upgrade.
  • Training is also clearly set out in How to upgrade your CIEP membership as an essential pillar of every upgrade.
  • Some training, but not all, is an allowable business expense to be deducted from your business’s profit to reduce your income tax and National Insurance contributions liability.

About Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford

Sue Littleford is the author of the CIEP guide Going Solo, now in its second edition. She went solo with her own freelance copyediting business, Apt Words, in March 2007 and specialises in scholarly humanities and social sciences.

 

 

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: back to school by Olia Danilevich on Pexels; love to learn by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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

Curriculum focus: Educational publishing

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In this regular feature for The Edit, former training director Jane Moody highlights areas of the CIEP’s Curriculum for professional development related to educational publishing.

Editors who work in educational publishing use all the same tools as every other kind of editor, so it is difficult to pick out anything specific. Often, however, the areas of scheduling and process are important to editors working in this field. Clarity is also particularly important in writing for educational purposes, so let’s look at these few aspects of the curriculum.

Knowledge criteriaEditorial competency, professional skills and attitudes
2.1.2 Schedules and budgeting• Understands the importance of scheduling and budgeting within any publishing process
• Understands the influence of the schedule/budget on the scope of editing/proofreading
2.1.3 Editorial processes• Understands the meaning and significance of common editorial terminology
• Understands the roles and responsibilities of members of an editorial team
• Understands the stages of the editorial process
2.1.4 Production processes• Understands the roles and responsibilities of a production team
• Understands the meaning and use of common production terminology
• Understands the stages of the production process (eg prepress, print/electronic production)
2.3.3 Clarity in writing• Understands the need to avoid ambiguity
• Understands appropriate use of language and tone
• Understands conciseness (elimination of redundancy/repetition)
• If space is limited or layout is fixed, is aware of the need to fit any change into the available space without causing a new problem
• Can reword appropriately to simplify, clarify or shorten text
• Can identify whether material is well expressed and flows logically, with the ideas and wording easy to follow

Resources to support your learning and CPD

The CIEP course Editorial Project Management would be really useful to enhance your skills. You could also try the PTC course Introduction to Digital Project Management. For clarity in writing, try the CIEP courses Getting to Grips with Grammar and Punctuation and Plain English for Editors. The CIEP guide Editing Textbooks would also be worth a read.

This book chapter would also be worth reading: Miha Kovač, Mojca K. Šebart. ‘Educational publishing: how it works: primary and secondary education publishing’ in: The Oxford Handbook of Publishing, edited by Angus Phillips and Michael Bhaskar. OUP, 2019, pp274–288.

If you work with interactive exercises, the CIEP course Editing Digital Content could prove useful.

Read Anneke Schmidt’s blog post: ‘What makes a good elearning course? elearning best practices explained’ (Skill & Care, 13 March 2023). This post could also lead you down various other useful rabbit holes.

The Society of Young Publishers has published the video ‘Introduction to Education Publishing’, which you can find on YouTube. It’s a panel discussion and gives a good overview of the education sector of the publishing industry.

This is only a snapshot – almost every other topic in domains 1 and 2 of the Curriculum for professional development are relevant to editing for educational publishing!

About Jane Moody

Jane has worked with books for all her working life (which is rather more years than she cares to admit), having started life as a librarian. She started a freelance editing business while at home with her two children, which she maintained for 15 years before going back into full-time employment as head of publishing for a medical Royal College.

Now retired, she has resurrected her editorial business, but has less time for work these days as she spends much time with her four grandchildren and in her garden.

 

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 Pixabay on Pexels.

Posted by Sue McLoughlin, blog assistant.

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