Tag Archives: terminology

Curriculum focus: The publishing process

KNOWLEDGE CRITERIA	EDITORIAL 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.

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.

What’s e-new? Technology terminology

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Of bits, nerds and cookies

Computing has added many words to our vernacular, as well as bending the meanings of others and repurposing them. This article explores the roots of some common terms we take for granted or might have been bemused by.

Acronyms, abbreviations and portmanteaus

Computer terminology loves acronyms, abbreviations and portmanteaus for their ability to create a simpler term from something more long-winded. Your computer is bristling with these – disks are connected by USB (Universal Serial Bus) or SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment); data is copied into RAM (random-access memory); the images reach your monitor via an HDMI (high-definition multimedia interface) connector, and data is sent around in bits (binary digits).

Many acronyms and abbreviations come from people’s names. For example the RSA algorithm, which is at the heart of most security on the internet, is named after its authors: Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. Meanwhile the Linux operating system takes its name from its original author, Linus Torvalds, who wrote it as a version of Unix.

Technology has often relied on abbreviations for practical reasons. In the early days of text messages, abbreviations were essential to fit a short message length with limited typing capability. Early computing systems used modems to connect to the internet, and transmission speeds were slow (remember the fun of waiting for an image to download with a modem?), so abbreviations slimmed down messages. This has carried over into social media today. One example pertinent to editors is TL;DR, which means ‘too long; don’t read’. Perhaps we should reclaim this as NAE – needs an editor.

Inventions

Some words are complete inventions. For some reason, customer support seems to provide a rich seam of these. Maybe this says something about the job? Two examples are PEBKAC (problem exists between chair and keyboard) and the error code Id10t (I’ll leave you to figure that one out for yourself). Terms for the user seem to be a common theme – perhaps this confirms the stereotype of computer people not always being people people! My favourite has to be ‘wetware’ or ‘liveware’, which interfaces more or less neatly with the hardware and software.

Repurposing

Repurposing or flexing the meaning of language has always happened, and the terminology of technology is no different. Many of the most common terms have come to us via this route.

One good example is the term ‘surf’, as in ‘surfing the internet’. One of the first uses in the computing context was in 1992. Before that the term for the practice of riding on boards on waves can potentially be traced back to 15th-century Hawaii. In the 20th century surfing became more popular in the US, especially in 1960s California. It seems to be around the 1980s that some new uses started to appear – ‘van surfing’ (dancing on a van roof); ‘train surfing’ (riding on the roof of a train) and then ‘channel surfing’ (hopping from channel to channel using a TV remote control). I suspect it was a short hop for Silicon Valley to borrow and adopt the term from there.

Your average computer geek’s (originally meaning ‘fool’ or ‘freak’ in Middle Low German, but has become a slang term for a slightly obsessive enthusiast) reading matter often draws inspiration from some odd sources. Nerd, another term for the stereotypical slightly obsessive computer person, appears to come from the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo. Cookie, a term for a small packet of information passed between a web browser and web server, came from ‘magic cookies’ used by programmers, which in turn has its roots in fortune cookies, as it is a small container for information.

Often history has had a hand in the repurposing of words. Patch is a good example of this. The term is now used to describe a series of changes to computer code to fix problems or improve the code. If you look at the update history on your computer, you can often see references to patches. This comes from the time when paper tapes or punched cards were used to put information into computers. When you needed to change a program, you had to cut out part of the tape and patch in a new bit. Meanwhile ‘bug’, used to describe an error in computer code, is often wrongly attributed to Second World War computing pioneer Grace Hopper, who tracked down a problem to a moth caught in one of the computer’s relays (a sort of mechanical switch). She taped it into the logbook for the computer with the word ‘bug!’ written next to it. However there are earlier records of bug being used to describe defects in mechanical systems as far back as the 1870s, and Thomas Edison certainly used the term in his notes.

Problems

Some computing terminology has, like any language, acquired problematic terms. Recently I worked on a computing book that referred heavily to the ‘master–slave system’. This term refers to a computing system (or part of one) where one piece of equipment or component has a controlling (master) function. The term is decades old, and a recent article in Wired found that in 1976 67,000 US patents used it. Unfortunately, this means it is deeply embedded in many technologies, despite being rooted in unacceptable practices and discriminatory language.

In the book I worked on this led to a lot of discussion, as the term is so well understood that really it needs an industry-wide agreement on what to use instead. Fortunately the company whose technology the book was about was happy to implement its own approach, using ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ instead.

The issue raises a lot of questions within the industry, highlighting yet another area in society that suffers from a lack of diversity. Wired’s article on this, ‘Tech Confronts Its Use of the Labels “Master” and “Slave”’, is an interesting insight into why changes like this take so long.

As you can see, like any new innovation, technology has adopted, stolen, repurposed and occasionally mangled existing language in order to describe itself. And these new words have then been incorporated into more general English usage, often with further repurposing.

About Andy Coulson

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

About the CIEP

Find out more about:

Photo credits: cookies by Jason Jarrach; surfer by Jeremy Bishop, both on Unsplash.

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

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

Forum matters: Editorial terminology: Grammar, inclusivity and meaning

What is terminology?

Terminology. Definitions. Vocabulary. Jargon. The meaning of things. The official definition is ‘the body of terms used with a particular technical application in a subject of study, profession, etc.’ (Lexico). This term can definitely be applied to editing, which has a marvellous lexicon of editing terms, such as widows, orphans, ligatures, en dash, justify, leading and kerning, which new editors may puzzle over.

Grammar terminology

It’s very common to know instinctively that something ‘looks wrong’ when you’re editing, but you may not have the knowledge of grammar terminology to be able to confidently say what is wrong, and why*. Perhaps you weren’t taught formal grammar at school, or perhaps you learned about grammar a long time ago and your skills are rusty. The new CIEP Getting to Grips with Grammar and Punctuation course is designed to give students the skills, terminology and confidence to be a better editor.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that many grammatical terms are known by more than one name: is it a gapping comma or an elided comma? An adverbial or adjectival phrase? A dangling participle or a dangling modifier? And what’s it called when you start a sentence with ‘so’ – and why is it so common today?

And for the last word in terminology? The CIEP proofreading and copyediting courses include access to a Resource centre which contains – among many other useful documents – a glossary of all the publishing and editorial terms you will ever need, from ‘abbreviation’ to ‘Word template’. There’s also a glossary in the back of New Hart’s Rules – my go-to style guide. For fiction editors, MH Abrams’ and Geoffrey Harpham’s A Glossary of Literary Terms will come in useful.

*You’ll need to be registered for the fiction forum to see this post.

Look it up!

One of the skills that it’s essential for an editor or proofreader to master is knowing when to look something up, knowing where to look it up, then actually looking it up and applying the answer to the text they’re working on. The forums can be super useful for this too.

Not sure whether to use ‘who’ or ‘whom’? See ‘who/whom – going cross-eyed’.

Do verb tenses make you tense? Then see ‘Please help with some technical jargon’.

Hold on – what is copyediting?

One of the questions editors and proofreaders are asked most often is: what is copyediting? What is line editing? What’s the difference between them? Unfortunately, there is no one universally accepted definition of these terms. Some people think that they are very different beasts, while some people think they are the same thing. And what about proof-editing? What does that involve – and where do you draw the line?

The most important thing is that editors and proofreaders tell clients clearly what service their project needs, and list the tasks they will carry out on a job. That way, there’s no confusion. For more guidance on this, see What is proofreading? and What is copyediting?

Being inclusive

It’s not just editing terminology we need to consider. We also need to think about the words we use around disability, age, ethnicity, culture and sexuality. These are always changing, and editors and proofreaders must keep up with these changes.

Threads on these topics come up a lot on the forums – here’s a selection you may like to read. I guarantee that you will learn something!

A thread on ‘What is a female-headed household?’ led to a passionate discussion on terminology, as did threads on ‘Is “pro-poor” the best term to use?’, ‘Is the phrase “Black, indigenous and people of colour” acceptable?’, ‘People of colour’ and one on the best wording to use around mental health.

I especially enjoyed the thoughtful discussion on these threads on sexist terms and whether or not we should refer to master copies, which referenced a session on sensitivity issues in a recent Cloud Club meeting.

Finally, one thread contains some helpful suggestions for resources around inclusive language.

Whichever words you choose to use, remember this: ‘Your words have power. Speak words that are kind, loving, positive, uplifting, encouraging, and life-giving’ (unknown author).

Niche knowledge

Of course, discussion on the forums isn’t always serious. There are plenty of light-hearted threads too, such as these on betting, butterflies and bridges.

And if you want to tell someone you’re a copyeditor without telling them you’re a copyeditor, is there any better way than to enquire: Should liturgical Latin terms be set in italic?

Just ask!

As ever, the forums are wonderfully diverse resources of all kinds of knowledge. If you want to know the answer to something, and you’ve tried looking in your library of style guides, editing guides and reference books, then ask on the forums. Someone is bound to know.

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

About the CIEP

Find out more about:

Photo credits: typesetting tools by Etienne Girardet; Welcome by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash.

Posted by Abi Saffrey, CIEP blog coordinator.

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