Category: Editors Canada (formerly Editors’ Association of Canada)

Luca Pellanda—Posture for editors (EAC-BC meeting)

Luca Pellanda, a registered massage therapist, spoke at last week’s EAC-BC meeting about the importance of posture for good health. Married to editor Eve Rickert, Pellanda knows all about the particular stresses we face. He bases his work on the three concepts in his health triangle:

  • REST
  • nutrition, and
  • mobility.

They are all interconnected. Rest is in capitals, he explained, because “it’s important. But as editors, you don’t seem to do much of that.” Figuring out when and how much to rest can ultimately make you healthier and more productive. Even when we face a deadline crunch, it’s usually better to take breaks and recharge rather than trying to power through.

Sleeping posture

Restfulness usually begins with getting enough sleep, and Pellanda showed how having the right support when you’re lying down—the kind that keeps your spinal column from overrotating at the neck or pelvis—can help you stay asleep longer and give you a more restful night.

Back

When you sleep on your back, make sure your pillow isn’t too high, pushing your neck forward. A pillow under the knees can help keep your pelvis aligned with the spine. A thinner pillow—you can use a folded towel—at the small of your back can also be a huge help, supporting your back and allowing your back muscles to rest.

Front

If you sleep on your front, be aware again of whether your pillow is too high; if it is, it increases the curve of your cervical spine. Although Pellanda doesn’t recommend against sleeping on your front, he does point out that, to breathe, your head needs to be turned to the side, which can fatigue the neck.

A thin pillow in the midriff area keeps the pelvis from rotating downward and causing pain. Again, a folded towel can serve this function well.

Side

Find a pillow that is at the appropriate height so that your neck isn’t tilted and so that your spine is aligned. An advantage of ergonomic pillows is that they are designed to give your ear and nose enough room when you’re on your side. A pillow between the legs helps keep the hips level. Finally, a small pillow in the midsection helps take weight off the shoulders, making it less likely that your shoulders will collapse toward one another as you sleep and strain your neck and shoulder muscles. Your arms, when you’re on your side, may also need their own supports. Pellanda says that a down pillow—provided you don’t have allergies—is a great option, because you can shift the feathers around and adjust the heights of different parts of the pillow to accommodate your head and your arms.

The common theme to all of these sleeping postures is the advantage of the thin pillow at the midsection, which supports your weight no matter your position, helps keep your spinal column aligned, and allows your muscles to rest.

Sitting posture

Even when we have the best of intentions to sit up straight, a lot of us end up slouching. When you lean in to look at a computer screen, the muscles at the back of your neck get fatigued, and your head moves forward. Your shoulders rotate to compensate for your head, and your pelvis has to rotate to compensate for your shoulders. When you have good posture, your spine is supporting about twelve pounds of pressure. If you move your head two inches forward, the cervical spine has to support 32 pounds; three inches forward, and the spine has to support an equivalent of 42 pounds.

If possible, get a comfortable chair that has as many adjustments as possible so that you can customize it to your body. Lumbar support is good but not necessary—a stool can work just as well. Your feet should be flat on the ground or on a footrest with the toes pointing slightly upward. Some footrests are adjustable in tilt and height, and moving your feet while you work is actually very healthy, because it helps pump the blood back up from your legs into your torso. Make sure the front of your seat isn’t pressing into the back of your knees; otherwise it could interfere with blood circulation in your legs.

To get the most out of your work day, vary your posture: sit up straight, sit semi-reclined, and stand up. Being able to switch between positions wears on you less and lets you have longer stretches of productivity. Your body does need to take regular breaks, though, where you stretch or go for a walk. Everybody’s different, so telling everyone to take a break every twenty minutes isn’t realistic. Test out different work cycles of x minutes on, y minutes off to see what works for you. You can set up regular reminders on your computer to take breaks.

If you’re reading not on screen but on paper, find a way to bring the page up to you rather than taking your head down to the page. Angled workstations, whether built-in or add-on, are actually quite affordable, said Pellanda, and they can reduce aggravation. (An ergonomic specialist once suggested a two-inch binder as a low-cost way of propping up proofs and reducing neck strain.)

When you work, your arm should be lower than your desk. The inherent flaw of laptops, Pellanda pointed out, is that if your monitor is at the right height, your keyboard is not—and vice versa. To solve this problem, he advises getting either an external monitor or an external keyboard. “And keyboards are cheaper,” he said. Pellanda sees a lot of shoulder injuries from people using a move-around mouse; a trackball may help prevent some of those injuries.

Standing posture

Standing desks are becoming more popular and, again, it’s important to arrange the workstation so that it suits your body. There are setups that allow you to adjust the position of your monitor and keyboard so that you can sit as well as stand. Pellanda showed us options for stools that support you while you stand but also allow you to lean into them. Some also feature a padded region for the knees so that you can kneel slightly. Being able to move comfortably from standing to leaning to kneeling can lengthen the amount of time you can spend at your workstation without getting too tired.

When standing, make sure that you have supportive footwear. High heels can create all sorts of havoc with your posture because they prevent your weight from being evenly distributed. They can lead to shortening of your calf muscles and other problems, including bunions and plantar fasciitis.

We are used to thinking of our back muscles holding us up when we stand, but the strength of our core muscles plays an important role in our posture. Pellanda suggests swimming as an excellent way to exercise and strengthen your core because it makes you use your muscles symmetrically.

***

Ergonomic desks, chairs, and add-ons might seem to cost a lot of money, but Pellanda suggests that it’s an investment back into your health triangle. What’s the impact on your body of hours of slouching? Developing better posture allows your body to rest and could give you a better quality of life, so that you can actually enjoy it, when you’re done working.

Jack Joyce—A tour through the world of map editing (EAC-BC meeting)

I first started corresponding with Jack Joyce, founder and president of International Travel Maps and Books (ITMB Publishing) roughly a year ago when I was planning the PubPro 2013 unconference. I was inviting everyone who did any kind of publishing in B.C. to come share their wisdom about publication production. Joyce wrote back, “I’m not sure how valuable my participation would be, given that our production techniques, pre-press work, printing, and marketing differ so significantly from the needs of book publishers.” He added, “We use cartographers instead of project managers, senior cartographers instead of editors, and pre-press graphics specialists instead of pre-press print specialists. As maps are completely graphic and worked on by a dozen staff, there are no authors per se, although we credit the senior cartographers on the map when published. Even the eventual printing has to be done differently than for books.”

His response only made me want to learn more about editing and production in cartography, and we invited him to speak at our January EAC-BC meeting, where Joyce regaled us with eye-opening stories about ITMB’s rich history and the surprising state of mapping today.

History of ITMB

Joyce was raised in Toronto and educated as a town and regional planner at the University of Western Ontario. He moved to Vancouver in 1980, where he managed the Information Canada outlet, run by Renouf Books. Customers came in looking for maps of other Canadian cities. At the time, the retailer carried only maps of Vancouver and B.C. Joyce did four days of searching to track down a map of Ottawa that a customer was looking for. After that he forged relationships with suppliers, and his Hastings storefront became known as a place—really, the only place—people could get maps.

Everything was going fine, said Joyce, until someone came in looking for a map of Los Angeles. He contacted Rand McNally and began distributing that company’s maps of U.S. destinations. Then a customer came in looking for a map of London.

In response, Joyce contacted fifteen European countries asking them who was distributing their maps in North America. No one was, as it turns out, and Joyce became the North American distributor for fourteen of them. “We didn’t hear back from Switzerland,” Joyce quipped.

Recognizing a market niche, Joyce took six weeks off to visit Japan, South Korea, and China. At the time, in 1982, he was one of the first foreigners in China. After a two-hour meeting in Beijing he had secured a contract to do worldwide marketing of all maps of China, an arrangement that lasted until Tiananmen Square happened in 1989.

For South America, however, he “ran out of options.” Maps were basically impossible to find. So he teamed up with Australian cartographer Kevin Healey to form ITMB and began publishing original maps. “Kevin spent five years doing artwork by hand,” said Joyce. “He would attach typeset place names with beeswax. We worked that way until the early 1990s.”

In the 1980s, almost nothing had been published for any of South America; some governments, including Peru and Uruguay, hadn’t even done their own mapping. On one of the only available maps of Brazil, there was an island depicted at the mouth of the Amazon that Healey couldn’t find on any of the regional maps. That map, Joyce explained had been based on an aerial photograph that the Americans had taken in 1947, and the “island” was actually a cloud. This mistake persisted in maps for more than thirty years. “It’s not that unusual,” said Joyce. Even Google, as recently as 2012, showed an island in the South Pacific that doesn’t exist. “It was another cloud,” said Joyce.

Maps of various regions in Latin America became ITMB’s forte, but they also produced travel maps to other destinations all over the world. The maps of Europe at the time, explained Joyce, were all road maps. “None of the maps published showed railway lines.” Yet travellers to Europe usually explored the continent with a rail pass. So ITMB became the only firm that produced a map of Europe showing the rail lines.

Healey died in 1994. By that time Joyce had developed a relationship with the government of Vietnam’s mapping office, where he met his wife Lan, who worked as a cartographer and printer. Lan arrived in Canada in 1996 and took over cartographic production at ITMB, standardizing map design, and increasing the firm’s list from forty titles to 140 titles. Today, ITMB has over 490 titles in print and is the largest publisher of travel maps in the world.

State of mapping today

“Why are we still doing maps when everything is mapped electronically?” Joyce  said. As it turns out, the world is not nearly as well mapped as we believe. “Even Google will admit it’s only halfway through mapping the world.”

Around the time of the American invasion of Iraq, National Geographic had planed to do a feature on the historic treasures of Baghdad. Only shortly before they were scheduled to go to press did they realize that they didn’t have a map of Baghdad. Iraq was a very dangerous place to be sending in a map researcher, of course, but Joyce had a big and reliable enough team of researchers around the area that ITMB had managed to produce a good map of Baghdad. ITMB was the only firm in the world with artwork for Baghdad, and National Geographic called them for help, eventually printing 9 million copies of that map worldwide.

More recently, after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, ITMB was on call with various aid organizations providing maps of the country. Even the U.S. State Department didn’t have its own maps and had to turn to ITMB for help. (Sure enough, as of this writing, if you look up Haiti in Google Maps and zoom in, you can see roads they’ve drawn in by tracing the satellite photo, but, except for the main highway, almost none of them are named.)

There are still huge parts of the world that you can’t get maps for, particularly in Africa, where most of the governments don’t have mapping offices and aren’t concerned about mapping. ITMB has been working with a Scottish firm that has been developing a digital database of Africa, using its artwork and refining it for travel maps. Joyce and his colleagues prepared the first ever travel map of Northwest Africa. “And this was a week ago!” he said. “Don’t leave home without a map,” Joyce advised. Many countries don’t have the infrastructure to distribute maps. In some places, you can’t get a map locally.

Cartography can be a sensitive political issue; a lot of mapping is taken on by governments, and the government of one country is reluctant to map another country, because doing so implies that it has the right to map the other country. As a result, some maps look as though “the world drops off at the end of the country.” ITMB doesn’t take that attitude, said Joyce, and it pieces together information from different sources to produce maps that travellers would find useful, even for not-so-remote locations. For example, say you want to take a trip down the Pacific coast of the United States. There are plenty of road maps out there that can take you down the I-5, but if you wanted to visit McMinnville to see Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose or detour to Mount Hood, you’d be hard-pressed to find a map that had all of that information. ITMB, of course, has published just such a map.

The mapping process has certainly changed dramatically since Joyce started in this business. “In my lifetime, maps have moved from being done by hand, to being done by hand with typesetting, to scribing tools, to giant computers, to desktop computers,” said Joyce. The preferred software used to be Freehand, but Adobe purchased it and discontinued it. Now cartographers mostly use Illustrator. The iPad has really benefited mapping, because it lets the cartographer get georeferencing information in real time. She could be driving down a road in Israel and see where she appears on her map. If the map is off position, she can easily shift the road directly on the iPad to reflect where she actually is. Still, said Joyce, “A computer is only a machine. It’s only as good as the operator. You have to put in talent—a lot of artistic talent.” It’s not that hard to make a map that is technically accurate but looks boring, he said.

Editorial concerns in mapping

Curating information

When ITMB began, the firm relied heavily on atlases, travel guides (like Lonely Planet), any existing maps, and a huge team of researchers. Today Joyce and his colleagues still do this for some of the more remote parts of the world, but the information for a lot of places can be found in digital databases. “There’s almost a wealth of data. Our job is to take information out.” He had wanted to make a travel map of Australia, he explained, and he used a digital database to place a little airplane icon wherever there was an airport. “The whole map turned black,” he said—because many of the country’s ranchers and farmers have their own airstrips. To whittle down the number of airports on his map, he had to filter the database results, keeping only those airports with scheduled service, and the number of airplane icons dropped from thousands to twenty-six.

Proofreading

Once a cartographer has completed a map, it’s important to have another pair of eyes look over it. “Cartography is like every other type of editorial work,” said Joyce. Just as a person who’s written a book will have blind spots, “If you stare at the text long enough, it looks good.” Better yet is to take the map to (or back to) the travel destination and try to find errors—a process Joyce calls “ground truthing.” “A cartographer doesn’t have to have gone to Costa Rica to make a good map. But it helps,” he said. For some new maps of remote destinations, ITMB may do a small initial print run, essentially “buying five thousand researchers.” The early buyers of these maps will report back to the company—”This road is paved,” “This road is a kilometre over,” and so on. For a place like Ghana, Jack said, “You’re lucky if you can get the place name on the right side of the river and the names spelled at all reasonably,” adding, “You do your best.”

Spelling can be tricky in countries where the Latin alphabet isn’t the primary writing system. A week before his talk, Joyce and his wife were in Israel, heading toward Elat, Israel. Road signs leading up to Elat said “Elat” or “Ilat” or “Eilat.” Within Elat, most signs said “Elat,” except for one that said “Ilot.” The road signs there are in Hebrew, Arabic, then the Latin alphabet, and in many places the Latin spelling hadn’t been standardized. And the capital of Mongolia is variously spelled Ulan Bator, Ulaan Baatar, Ulaanbattar, etc. What is the correct spelling? “They don’t care!” said Joyce. Only China has imposed the Latin transliteration of its place names; other countries with non-Latin writing systems aren’t as concerned. To make sure users can find what they’re looking for, ITMB publishes the maps with the three most common variations—but there are times the cartographers can’t find any kind of consistency.

Editorial discretion

Maps done by a geological survey, said Joyce, can be used in a court of law. “My travel maps? No. Don’t try to fight a battle with them,” he said. If a road on a travel map were to scale, it would be a hundred kilometres wide—but for travellers, the roads are important to highlight. Another example is Fiji, which appears as a labelled cluster of dots on every world map; in reality, Fiji would be too small to see at that scale. Europe, too, is often depicted as bigger than it is, because otherwise it would be impossible to fit all of the information onto the map. ITMB’s business is travel maps, so its cartographers will exercise this kind of editorial discretion to give travellers the information they need.

Copyright

Joyce has noticed that sometimes after ITMB has done the legwork and published a map, other maps that look suspiciously similar will appear. But “Copyright is not something that’s so easy to defend, I’m afraid,” he said. Basically the artwork on the copy would have to be identical, down to the contours and typefaces. Even then, the legal fees involved in prosecuting copyright infringement would be prohibitive. “We don’t get mad—we get even,” Joyce said. “They published a map? We’ll publish a better map.” ITMB has built a reputation as the world’s premier travel map publisher, and the business is on good terms with travel publishers, many of whose guides feature ITMB maps. One factor in Joyce’s favour is that there’s not a whole lot of competition in cartography “because it’s so much damn work!” he said. It took them seven years to map Peru, he explained.

***

“Do we make money? Yes, overall, we do. But how much demand is there for Tonga, Malawi, and Antarctica?” Their primary motivation, explained Joyce, is not to make money; they love what they do, and “we do it because it has to be done. If we don’t do it, nobody will.”

What the heck’s happening in book publishing? (EAC-BC meeting)

Freelance writer, editor, indexer, and teacher Lana Okerlund moderated a lively panel discussion at the November EAC-BC meeting that featured Nancy Flight, associate publisher at Greystone Books; Barbara Pulling, freelance editor; and Laraine Coates, marketing manager at UBC Press. “There are lots of pronouncements about book publishing,” Okerlund began, “with some saying, ‘Oh, it’s doomed,’ and others saying that it’s undergoing a renaissance. What’s the state of publishing now, and what’s the role of the editor?”

Flight named some of the challenges in trade publishing today: publishers have had to scramble to get resources to publish ebooks, even though sales of ebooks are flattening out and in some cases even declining. Print books are also declining: unit sales are up slightly, but because of the pressure to keep list prices low, revenues are down. Independent bookstores are gone, so there are fewer places to sell books, and Chapters-Indigo is devoting much less space to books. Review pages in the newspaper are being cut as well, leaving fewer options for places to publicize books. The environment is hugely challenging for publishers, explained Flight, and it led to the bankruptcy just over a year ago of D&M Publishers, of which Greystone was a part. “We’ve all risen from the ashes, miraculously,” she said, “but in scattered form.” Greystone joined the Heritage Group while Douglas & McIntyre was purchased by Harbour Publishing, and many of the D&M staff started their own publishing ventures based on different publishing models.

The landscape “is so fluid right now,” said Pulling. “It changes from week to week.” There are a lot of prognosticators talking about the end of the traditional model of publishing, said Pulling. The rise of self-publishing—from its accessibility to its cachet—has led to a lot of hype and empty promises, she warned. “Everybody’s a publisher, everybody’s a consultant. It raises a lot of ethical issues.”

The scholarly environment faces some different challenges, said Coates. It can be quick to accept new things but sometimes moves very slowly. Because the main market of scholarly presses has been research libraries, the ebook issue is just now emerging, and the push is coming from the authors, who want to present their research in new ways that a book can’t really accommodate. She gave as examples researchers who want to release large amounts of their data or authors of Aboriginal studies titles who want to make dozens of audio files available. “Is confining ourselves to the book our mandate?” she asked. “And who has editorial control?”

Okerlund asked the panel if, given the rise in ebooks and related media, editors are now expected to be more like TV producers. Beyond a core of editorial skills, what other skills are editors expected to have?

“I’m still pretty old-fashioned,” answered Flight. “The same old skills are still going to be important in this new landscape.” She noted an interesting statistic that ebook sales are generally down, but ebooks for kids in particular have fallen 45% in the first half of 2013. As for other ebook bells and whistles, Greystone has done precisely one enhanced ebook, and that was years ago. They didn’t find the effort of that project worth their while. Coates agreed, saying “Can’t we just call it [the enhanced ebook] a website at this point? Because that’s what it really is.” Where editorial skills are going to be vital, she said, was in the realm of discoverability. Publishers need editors to help with metadata tagging and identifying important themes and information. Scholarly presses are now being called upon to provide abstracts not just for a book but also for each chapter, and editors have the skills to help with these kinds of tasks.

Pulling mentioned a growing interest in digital narratives, such as Kate Pullinger’s Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths, interactive online novels that have readers contribute threads to the stories. Inanimate Alice was picked up by schools as a teaching tool and is considered one of the early examples of transmedia storytelling. “Who is playing an editors’ role in the digital narrative?” asked Pulling. “Well, nobody. That role will emerge.”

Okerlund asked if authors are expected to bring more to the table. Flight replied, “Authors have to have a profile. If they don’t, they are really at a huge disadvantage. We’re not as willing to take a chance on a first-time author or someone without a profile.” Pulling expressed concern for the authors, particularly in the “Wild West” of self-publishing. “What happens to the writers?” she asked. In the traditional publishing model, if you put together a successful proposal, the publisher will edit your book. But now “Writers are paying for editing. Writers are being asked to write for free. They need to be able to market; they need to know social media. It’s very difficult for writers right now. Everybody’s trying to get something for nothing.” She also said that although self-publishing offers opportunity in some ways, “there’s so much propaganda out there about self-publishing.” Outfits like Smashwords and Amazon, she explained, have “done so much damage. It’s like throwing stuff to the wall and seeing what sticks, and they’re just making money on volume.”

Pulling sees ethical issues not only in those business practices but also in the whole idea of editing a work to be self-published, without context. “It’s very difficult to edit a book in a vacuum,” she said. “You have to find a way to create a context for each book,” which can be hard when “you have people come to you with things that aren’t really books.” She added, “Writers are getting the message that they need an editor, but some writers have gotten terrible advice from people who claim to be editors. Book editing is a specialized skill, and you have to know about certain book conventions. Whether it’s an ebook or a print book, if something is 300,000 words long, and it’s a novel, who’s going to read that?” A good, conscientious book editor can help an author see a larger context for their writing and tailor their book to that, with a strong overall narrative arc. “It’s incumbent upon you as a freelancer to educate clients about self-publishing,” said Pulling. Coates added, “We have a real PR problem now in publishing and editing. We’ve gotten behind in being out there publicly and talking about what we do. The people pushing self-publishing are way ahead of us. I think it’s sad that writers can’t just be writers. I can’t imagine how writing must suffer because of that.”

Both Flight and Pulling noted that a chief complaint of published authors was that their publishers didn’t do enough marketing. But, as Pulling explained, “unless it’s somebody who is set up to promote themselves all the time, it’s not as easy as it looks.” Coates said that when it comes to marketing, UBC Press tries everything. “Our audiences are all over the place,” she explained. “We have readers and authors who aren’t on email to people who DM on Twitter. It’s subject specific: some have huge online communities.” Books built around associations and societies are great, she explained, because they can get excerpts and other promotional content to their existing audiences. She’s also found Twitter to be a great tool: “It’s so immediate. Otherwise it’s hard to make that immediate connection with readers.”

Okerlund asked the panel about some of the new publishing models that have cropped up, from LifeTree Media to Figure 1 Publishing and Page Two Strategies. Figure 1 (started by D&M alums Chris Labonté, Peter Cocking, and Richard Nadeau), Pulling explained, does custom publishing—mostly business books, art books, cookbooks, and books commissioned by the client. Page Two, said Pulling, is “doing everything.” Former D&Mers Trena White and Jesse Finkelstein bring their clients a depth of experience in publishing. They have a partnership with a literary agency but also consult with authors about self-publishing. They will also help companies get set up with their own publishing programs. Another company with an interesting model is OR Books, which offers its socially and politically progressive titles directly through their website, either as ebooks or print-on-demand books.

The scholarly model, said Coates, has had to respond to calls from scholars and readers to make books available for free as open-access titles. The push does have its merits, she explained: “Our authors and we are funded by SSHRC [the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada]. So it makes sense for people to say, ‘If we’re giving all this money to researchers and publishers, why are they selling the books?'” The answer, she said, lies simply in the fact that the people issuing the call for open access don’t realize how many resources go into producing a book.

So where do we go from here? According to Pulling, “Small publishers will be okay, as long as the funding holds.” Flight elaborated: “There used to be a lot of mid-sized publishers in Canada, but one after another has been swallowed up or gone out of business.” About Greystone since its rebirth, Flight explained, “We’re smaller now. We’re just doing everything we’ve always done, but more so. We put a lot more energy into identifying our market.” She added, “It’s a good time to be a small publisher, if you know your niche. There’s not a lot of overhead, and there’s collegiality. At Greystone we’ve been very happy in our smaller configuration, and things are going very well.”

Pulling encouraged us to be more vocal and active politically. “One of the things we should do in Vancouver is write to the government and get them to do something about the rent in this city. We don’t have independent bookstores, beyond the specialty stores like Banyen or Kidsbooks. And at the same time Gregor Robertson is celebrating Amazon’s new warehouse here?” She also urged us to make it clear to our elected representatives how much we value arts funding. One opportunity to make our voices heard is coming up at the Canada Council’s National Forum on the Literary Arts, happening in February 2014.

EAC gets a structural edit (EAC-BC meeting)

On October 17, 2011, the Canada Not-for-Profit Corporations Act came into force, and it requires all federally incorporated non-profits—such as the Editors’ Association of Canada—to comply with new regulations by October 2014. If it doesn’t comply, EAC will be dissolved and will no longer be federally incorporated.

EAC struck a Governance Task Force in August 2012 to address the issue, and Maureen Nicholson chaired the task force in its first year. She spoke to us at yesterday’s EAC-BC meeting to explain the governance changes and to get member feedback.

The changes, Nicholson explained, are being forced upon us, and we have to comply. (“It’s kind of like the Borg,” she said.) The task force is following the process that Corporations Canada recommended for the transition:

  1. review current letters patent and bylaws (we have only one)
  2. prepare “articles of continuance”—a two-page form that outlines the rules by which the organization is allowed to exist and that signals our intention to continue to be federally incorporated
  3. prepare new bylaws
  4. get members’ approval
  5. submit required documents to Corporations Canada

Right now EAC has a couple of drafts for the articles of continuance and is consulting its members, lawyers, and other organizations that have handled this challenge. Members will vote on the new governance documents at the AGM in 2014.

The net effect of this new law, Nicholson said, is to move non-profit organizations more toward a corporate model of accountability. For EAC, its major impacts will be on membership, directors and officers, and branches and twigs.

Membership

Big change: Our five classes of membership will become one class; every member will have a right to vote and access EAC member benefits and services. We can, however, retain several fee categories for emeritus members, honorary life members, etc. We would also establish affiliates, which can be individuals or organizations that are not considered members of the organization and don’t have the right to vote. Students would fall into this category.

What do members have to do? Nothing, unless you’re a student, in which case you’ll have to decide whether to be an affiliate or to join the organization as a full member.

The concept of affiliates could open doors to closer co-operation with editor training programs and schools, institutional participation in EAC with bulk discounts, and so on. At the moment, some of the branch executive positions can be occupied only by a voting member; under the new legislation, that restriction would disappear.

Directors and officers

Big change: We will elect a board of directors, not people to specific executive positions. So in 2015, for example, you would see a slate when you vote, and the top 12 candidates would form the National Executive Council. They’d then meet to figure out who takes what responsibility. This approach is more aligned with a corporate model: the board is collectively responsible for the good of the organization rather than having each individual be responsible for specific positions. One concern raised at the meeting was that, under this new structure, we will have no guarantee of regional representation.

Another change resulting from the legislation is that we now have to distinguish between directors and officers. Directors are all elected; officers are the signing authorities. The board’s job is to appoint the officers. Officers may also be directors, but they don’t have to be members of the organization. One advantage to this model is that you might want to hire your officers from outside of the organization to get a particular skill set.

Further, there can be no ex officio directors: right now our past president and executive director sit on the NEC but are not elected. In the new structure, they would no longer be directors.

Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about this restructuring at the branch level. The legislation is silent on the issue, and we don’t need to change our procedures as far as branch elections go.

What do members have to do? Nothing, except recognize that the transition AGM election may be a little tricky.

Branches and twigs

Big change: We have to formalize the accountability link between the national office and branches.

Our audited financial statements reflect only what goes on at the national level. The branches have been pretty autonomous financially—a fact that has been advantageous in some situations and problematic in others, where there has been a lack of accountability. EAC’s lawyers strongly advise that the national office be accountable for branches; the legislation forces us to formalize the financial reporting relationship.

What do members have to do? The branch will have to recommend one or two branch officers to the NEC, and they will have to ensure the flow of financial information to the national office.

Over the next year, EAC will have to go through these steps:

  • Fall 2013: prepare draft articles of continuance and bylaws and make them available to members for input
  • November 2013–March 2014: prepare final draft of articles of continuance and bylaws, along with needed revisions to EAC’s policies and procedures
  • April 2014: circulate revised governance documents to members
  • May/June 2014: vote on governance documents at the AGM
  • October 17, 2014 (latest): submit articles of continuance to Corporations Canada

What should members do? Read the interim report from the Governance Task Force; read the draft bylaw and FAQ, which will be available later this month; and contribute comments to the task force via LinkedIn, Facebook, Interactive Voice, or email ([email protected]). Nicholson noted that EAC has a long tradition of listening to and valuing member input in these kinds of issues.

Upcoming posts: PLAIN 2013 and EAC-BC

I feel privileged to have been a part of the inspiring PLAIN 2013 conference over the weekend, which brought together clear communication representatives from nineteen countries and had us talking about everything from legalese to health literacy to usability testing, among many other fascinating topics. Huge congratulations to Cheryl Stephens and her team for putting on such a terrific event.

A major takeaway for me is that opportunities abound for editors and other communication specialists. After years of toiling in the book industry, whose traditional model has teetered on the brink for as long as I’ve been involved, I’ve found renewed optimism in my profession after attending this conference. Recognition by not only government but also the private and academic sectors that clear communication is essential in our age of information overload means there is so much work out there for plain language practitioners and trainers, and the fact that a lot of what we do is rooted in social justice and the belief that citizens, union members, and consumers have the right to understand our laws, regulations, and contracts is hugely affirming and provides an extra bit of motivation to keep doing what we do.

As usual, I’ll be summarizing the sessions I attended, but, as usual, the process will probably take me a few weeks. Interrupting the PLAIN entries will be one about tomorrow’s important EAC-BC meeting, where Maureen Nicholson will tell us about potential changes to the Editors’ Association of Canada’s governance structure and ask members for their input. A primer on what EAC’s governance task force has been up to is here.

Editors’ show and tell: time-saving tips and tricks

We kicked off the 2013–2014 EAC-BC meeting season last evening with a packed house and an editors’ show and tell of some of our favourite time-savers. Here’s a summary*:

Fact checking

  • Frances Peck showed us CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute database, which is handy if you need to work with a document that has legal citations or references to acts and regulations. The searchable database covers both federal and provincial case law and has up-to-date wording of legislation. The University of Victoria Libraries vouch for the database’s reliability.
  • I mentioned the Library of Congress Authorities as a reliable place to check names.
  • Lana Okerlund told us about GeoBC for fact checking B.C. place names.
  • Naomi Pauls and Jennifer Getsinger both mentioned the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base for place names within Canada.
  • I also told the crowd about SearchOpener, which I’d mentioned in a previous post. The tool lets you perform multiple Google searches at once—a boon for checking fact-heavy texts.

Notes and bibliography

  • Stef Alexandru told us about RefWorks and Zotero, which are bibliographic management programs. The former costs $100 (USD), whereas the latter is free. In both of these programs, you can enter all of your bibliographic information, and it produces a bibliography in the style (e.g., Chicago) that you want.
  • Microsoft Word’s bibliography tool does the same thing (under “Manage Sources”)

The trick to all of these programs, though, is that you would have had to work with your client or author early enough in the writing process for them to have used them from the outset. Nobody knew of any specific tricks for streamlining the editing of notes and bibliographies, although Margaret Shaw later mentioned a guest article on Louise Harnby’s blog by the developer of EditTools, Richard Adin, in which he writes:

The books I work on often have reference lists of several hundred entries. Using the Journals macro, I can check and correct most of the entries in the list automatically. I once timed it and found that I can check about 600 references in approximately 15 minutes; it used to take me hours, especially if I had to look up obscure and rarely cited journal names. Now I look them up once, enter them in the dataset, and move on.

  • For fact checking bibliographical information, one suggestion was to use WorldCat.

Document cleanup

  • Jack Lyon’s Editorium has a FileCleaner Word add-on that helps with a lot of common search-and-replace cleanup steps. NoteStripper may also help you prepare a file for design if the designer doesn’t want embedded footnotes or endnotes.
  • Grace Yaginuma told us how to strip all hyperlinks from your file by selecting all (Ctrl + A) and then using Ctrl + Shift + F9.
  • To remove formatting from text on the clipboard, suggested apps include Plain Clip and Format Match.

Ensuring consistency

  • Nobody in the room had tried PerfectIt, but there seemed to be positive views of it on EAC’s listserv. It catches consistency errors that Word’s spelling and grammar checkers miss, including hyphenation, capitalization, and treatment of numbers. You can also attach specific dictionaries or style sheets to it.

Author correspondence and queries

  • Theresa Best keeps a series of boilerplate emails in her Drafts folder; another suggestion was to have boilerplate email text as signature files.
  • For queries that you use again and again, consider adding it as an AutoCorrect entry, a trick I use all the time and saves me countless keystrokes. Store longer pieces of boilerplate text as AutoText.

Proofreading

  • Naomi Pauls and Theresa Best talked about the utility of checklists. I concur!

Structural editing

  • A few people in the audience mentioned that a surprising number of editors don’t know about using Outline View or Navigation Pane in Microsoft Word to do outlining and structural editing.
  • One person said Scrivener is a fantastic tool for easily moving large chunks of text around and other aspects of structural editing.

Business administration

  • Janet Love Morrison uses Billings for time tracking and invoicing, and she highly recommends it. Other options recommended include iBiz and FreshBooks. (Someone also mentioned Goggle as a time tracker, but I can’t find anything about it. Can anyone help?)
  • Theresa Best has just begun using Tom’s Planner, which she described as a free and intuitive project-management program.
  • Peter Moskos mentioned that years ago, his firm had invested in FastTrack Schedule, which cost a few hundred dollars but, he said, was worth every penny, especially for creating schedules for proposals.
  • One recommended scheduling app for arranging meetings is Doodle.com.

Editors’ wish list

  • Naomi Pauls said that she’d like to see a style sheet app that lets you choose style options easily rather than having to key them in. (Being able to have your word process0r reference it while checking the document would be a plus.)
  • Someone else proposed a resource that would be a kind of cheat sheet to summarize the main differences between the major style guides, to make it easier to jump from one to another when working on different projects.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the meeting and especially those who shared their tips and tricks!

*Although I knew some names at the meeting, I didn’t catch all of the names of the contributors (or I’d forgotten who’d said what). If you see an entry here and thought, “Hey—that’s me!” please send me a note, and I’ll be happy to add your name.

Condensing texts: Lessons from a recent project

At the Editors’ Association of Canada conference in June, Elizabeth Macfie gave a talk about shortening text. From the program:

All editors and writers need to be able to shorten texts. Brevity enhances readability; squeezes content into limited spaces; saves money on translation, proofreading and printing; and increases social-media quotability. This session provides principles, techniques and tools for efficiently trimming texts, as well as the justification for that trimming. We’ll practise on material such as correspondence, newspaper articles and headings, reports, instructions, interview and meeting transcripts, PowerPoint slides, abstracts and tweets.

I was disappointed to have missed Macfie’s talk, which was at the same time as Helena Aalto and Laurel Boone’s, but I got a chance to chat with her during breaks at the conference and have looked through the excellent notes that she’s made available on the EAC website. At the time I was working on a project to shorten several academic reports—average length 20,000 words—to no more than 6,000 words each, for an upcoming anthology. I’ve completed the first major phase of that project and wanted to jot down some quick thoughts about my approach in case I ever find myself doing a similar project again, and I figured I may as well share them here.

The project

Way back when I was a student journalist, I was taught to load the front of a news article with critical information so that an editor working on deadline could easily trim from the bottom if the text didn’t fit. Too bad other genres aren’t as straightforward to cut.

My project consisted of nine master’s-level, thesis-length academic reports, each of which included standard components such as an abstract, introductory chapter, main body chapters, concluding chapter, and back matter (notes, bibliography, and up to several appendices). My job was to cut them down to digestible papers that would be compiled into a collection and used as teaching tools in both undergraduate and graduate classes.

Initial read-through

Look—don’t touch. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. I have to admit to cutting the abstract and appendices right away, to eliminate those distractions and to get a better idea of my true starting word count. Beyond those cuts, though (which were especially cathartic because they didn’t require much thought and they made me feel as though I’d accomplished something early on), I did my best to read through all of the text without deleting anything.

Putting the machete down for the first read prevents you from premature cutting; content that seems unimportant in an early part of the text may grow in relevance later on. It also allows you to get a good sense of the author’s main ideas. Highlight if you want—but try not to delete.

Structural cutting

“To retain the author’s voice, cut large chunks of text rather than individual words,” suggested Macfie when I spoke with her during the conference breaks. This phase of what I’ve called structural cutting—deleting whole sections, paragraphs, and sentences—is the analogue (or perhaps a subset?) of structural editing, and it’s a crucial step if you’re expecting to cut more than, say, 25% of your text. Working with changes tracked allows you to easily restore passages when you’ve decided you’ve cut too much.

Cut in several passes

What seems essential during one reading may reveal itself to be expendable during the next. If the schedule allows, let your brain and the text rest a bit before starting the next pass.

Cut introductions, conclusions, and back matter

Academic writing, particularly theses, can have a lot of repetition: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them” is an approach academics often quote and follow. Redundancy may be the antidote to confusion, but when your goal is to cut a text down to 30% of its original length, redundancy is a luxury.

The abstract, introduction, and conclusion are typically just summaries of the main body, and in those cases they can be cut right off the bat. You may have to restore part of the conclusion to give the final text a satisfying ending, but the introduction, which is usually a lot of signposting and scene setting, often doesn’t communicate the essence of the text. (In all of the reports I condensed, I could cut the introduction without losing meaning.) Certainly all appendices and go, as can most of the notes that don’t cite sources. Presumably if these were critical, they would be integrated into the main text.

Background and historical information—and academic reports and theses can have a lot of it, particularly in introductory chapters—can usually be cut or heavily condensed. If you find yourself asking if a paragraph really needs to be there, more often than not it can go. I also took advantage of authors’ tendencies to structure each chapter with introductory and concluding sections; again, because these repeated information within the chapter, I could cut these with no loss in meaning.

Cut quotes—especially block quotes

Writers often make a statement and then buttress it with a quote from an authority, essentially repeating information. Evaluate which one—the statement or the quote—holds the most weight, and cut the other. (I found I hung on to authors’ statements more than quotes, since they were often more concise and worked better with the surrounding text.) You can attach the citation for the quote to the statement if you need to, and keen readers wanting to know more can follow up with the source.

Cut examples

Writers use examples, much as they do with quotes, to support their point. But if their statement is understandable or authoritative without them, those examples—or at least most of them—can go.

Cut cross-references

Cut every reference to appendices or sections that no longer exist. My target word count was so much smaller than the initial word count that I took out internal cross-references entirely. Clauses like “As we’ll see in Chapter 2” were obvious flags for sentences that I could delete: either the information was repeated (in which case one of the instances could go), or it would be so much closer to the reference to it that such way-finding and priming tools were unnecessary.

Stylistic cutting

When I had the reports down to about 9,000 words, I refocused my efforts on phrase- and word-level cuts, concurrent with a stylistic edit that naturally eliminated wordiness. Although I don’t agree with everything in Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, this phase is where “omit needless words” holds true.

If you’ve got a strict target word count (as I had), try to come a but under it so that you have some wiggle room if you need to adjust the text in the final phase.

Cut parentheticals

Parentheticals, whether they set are set off by commas, parentheses, or dashes, can usually be taken out without sacrificing the main point of the sentence. (Case in point: that last sentence.) Cutting them also preserves the author’s voice, because you’re not changing the way the author has expressed the main idea.

Cut metadiscourse

“It should be noted that” and similar phrases are self-conscious and unnecessary. Get rid of them.

Shorten lists

And I don’t mean cutting list items (unless they’re superfluous examples). Rather, because a list consists of a stem followed by list item A, list item B, list item C, and so on, see if you can find ways to integrate repeated information in the list items into the stem (e.g., “…followed by list items A, B, C, and so on”).

Apply usual stylistic editing principles

A cop-out? You bet. But eliminating redundancies, cutting wordiness (“a total of” is almost always unnecessary; “in an X manner” and “on a Y basis” can usually be shortened), changing voice from passive to active where appropriate, and using verbs and adjectives instead of nominalizations will not only shorten text but also make it a more engaging read.

Final read-through

Always—always!—read through the final text before submitting it to the author or client. Obvious advice, perhaps, but it’s especially important when cutting. If you can, let the text sit for a day or two and come back to it with fresh eyes and a (relatively) blank mind, so that you can easily spot where you’ve inadvertently cut out a definition or where you have to smooth the transitions between paragraphs and sections. Another option is to work with a partner who could do a cold read and identify confusing or choppy content.

Other thoughts

Terminology

As liberally as I’ve written “cut” in this post, I tried not to use the term when I corresponded with the authors; “condense” or “distill” did a better job of capturing the spirit of my task. When I asked authors to review my work, I did acknowledge that condensing a text down to less than a third of its length necessarily meant that not all of the content was there but that I hoped they found the final text stood well on its own.

Scheduling

I was lucky to have had a flexible schedule for this project, which let me set the reports aside for a bit before returning to them for another pass at cutting. Once the information got a chance to percolate in my brain, I had a better handle on what was important and what wasn’t. So often I’d feel as though I’d hit a wall and just couldn’t possibly cut anymore, but being able to leave the text and come back to it always highlighted further opportunities to trim.

If you ever have to do major condensing, try to schedule plenty of time for it. The time you actively spend cutting is a small fraction of the time you need to let the text simmer.

Importing other skill sets

You don’t have to be an indexer to cut texts, of course, but my experience indexing certainly helped me pinpoint the authors’ main arguments in each paragraph and identify what not to cut. (It’s no wonder many indexers also work as abstracters.) Twitter, oddly enough, has also honed my cutting skills: I found myself applying the same critical thought process to cutting words and paragraphs as when I’m trying to squeeze a tweet down to its 140-character limit.

***

These notes are just a case study of one editor’s experiences with one project. Certainly if you were working with different genres, audiences, and word limits, you’d have to adjust your tack accordingly. I’d strongly recommend Elizabeth Macfie’s notes from her EAC conference talk for a more general overview of techniques and strategies for condensing text.

Laurel Hyatt—The chart clinic (EAC conference 2013)

Laurel Hyatt gave us a quick tour of the system she uses to diagnose and treat ailing charts. Taking the medical metaphor further, she said that at the substantive editing stage, the goal is prevention; at the copy-editing stage, the goal is successful treatment; and at the proofreading stage, sometimes all we can do is try to keep the chart alive. The earlier you can intervene when you spot a poor chart, the better.

Charts are the trifecta of communication: numbers, words, and pictures. When they come together in harmony, said Hyatt, they can be a beautiful thing. If one or more of those elements goes wrong, the chart can be a dog’s breakfast.

Charts should tell a story. Hyatt showed us examples functional and dysfunctional charts in each of four of the most popular types of charts. Here is just a sample of her advice:

Bar charts

Do

  • make the y-axis begin at 0. Doing otherwise could exaggerate the difference between two bars and be misleading.
  • show scales (such as years) in even increments.

Don’t

  • use more than about ten bars per chart.
  • use more precision in number labels than necessary.

If you have too little data, consider using text instead. If there’s too much data, try a table. Even-year time series may work better as a line chart, and parts of a whole that add up to 100% may work better as a pie chart.

Line charts

Do

  • use a scale that clearly shows changes over time (or whatever you’re measuring on the x-axis).
  • use even increments of time (or whatever you’re measuring on the x-axis)

Don’t

  • use too many lines. Even with a legend, crowded lines will be confusing and hard to interpret.

When you have uneven increments of time, a bar chart might be a better choice; if you have too many lines, a bar chart or table might be more appropriate. If the data don’t change enough over time, consider using text.

Pie charts

Data visualization specialists like Edward Tufte dislike pie charts, but Hyatt believes that they can serve a function when the aim isn’t to do any precision comparisons.

Do

  • use pie charts to show parts of a whole.

Don’t

  • use fewer than three or more than about six slices.
  • use more than one pie to compare apples and oranges.
  • use slices that represent 0%.

If you have too many slices, or the slices are too thin, a bar chart or table might work better. If there are only two slices, summarize the data as text. Changes in time are better compared using a line chart rather than separate pie charts.

Pictographs

We don’t come across too many pictographs in our work, but they can be very effective when done creatively. You can suggest using them at the developmental and substantive editing stages if you think they work well to get the message across.

Do

  • use proportionate size to indicate data.

Don’t

  • use a pictograph just because it looks cool.
  • use three-dimensional objects to represent anything other than volume.

Too often, said Hyatt, when there’s geographically sensitive data, people default to using some kind of map, but maps are not always the most effective choices, especially if you’re expected to compare data between locations. Opt for other types of charts, tables, or text if the data you’re representing is very technical or if it has to be shown precisely.

Further resources