As ever, the second weekend in September is conference weekend for the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (#CIEP2023 to its friends, this year). The in-person folks gathered on the banks of the Clyde in a conference hotel, the online folks gathered in the ether. There were more concurrent sessions than ever, to give the widest possible choice, so what follows is a sprint through my personal highlights, not a description of the entire conference. Conference-goers now have access to recordings of the sessions they couldn’t get to, or want to see again, and I’m carving out time in my schedule to make sure I get to them pronto!
Robin Ince is a brilliant way to start a Sunday
The traditional start to the working part of the conference is the Whitcombe Lecture. Robin Ince had two main threads to a wide-ranging and joyous talk – that it is impossible to have too many books (true) and that the ideal way to start each day is with something uplifting, a magnificent sharing of ideas from all the consciousnesses on your bookshelves (also true). Much better for the soul than doom-scrolling through social media.
The man is a force of nature, taking us on a virtual tour of indie bookshops he has known and loved (including some sadly no longer with us, such as The Cottage, in Penn, Buckinghamshire, and about which he told the most hilarious and, I hope, partly invented, story, which I could well picture, having bought at The Cottage myself).
Robin made the important point that reading lets you see into other people’s minds – whether the book is fiction or nonfiction – and gain new perspectives. If you don’t read stories (and the best nonfiction is also a story) then you are trapped in your own mind, the worst kind of echo chamber.
Not a one of us is objective – we are just so used to our own preferences, biases and, indeed, prejudices that we can start to think that everyone who doesn’t think like us is wrong. And that’s wrong. Reading opens up new vistas, new perspectives that make us realise that not everyone thinks like us by any stretch of the imagination, and the world is all the richer for it.
We live amongst people; freelance editors and proofreaders market their skills to people; our clients, whether indie authors, desk editors or corporate entities, are people, and by reading across a range of genres, of topics, of styles, of eras, our minds become more flexible, and more tolerant (one hopes) and more able to relate to people who aren’t cookie-cutter versions of ourselves.
Ideas coming in from myriad sources spark new connections in us, turbo-boosting our creativity.
Robin, as you can see, left us buzzing!
Hilary Cadman on editors’ tools
I went to Hilary Cadman’s session on tools even though I use two of the four she talked about already and have taken her PerfectIt courses. The third one was Editors Toolkit+, which I’d tried a few years earlier and abandoned because of its tendency to override your own keyboard shortcuts. I was therefore delighted to find that that problem has been addressed by Jack Lyons and I’m about to download it again for the 45-day trial to see how I can best make use of it. It has a host of tools for clean-up, and is generally a pretty nifty addition to our editorial toolbelts.
The fourth tool was ProWritingAid, which I’d not heard of before. I’m planning on giving it a go for these blog posts (not this one, though – time is too crunched just yet to learn how to play with new toys). Let’s see if AI assists are worth having!
I already use PerfectIt – a consistency checking program that has been in my personal toolkit for years and years. If you have a house style you need to write to, or you want to impose on others, then PerfectIt is your friend (well, the PC version is; sadly the Mac version cannot accommodate you adding your own style sheets).
I’m also already a user of a text expander, of which there are several. They’re like Word’s Autocorrect, but more so. You have a shortcut which expands into a sentence, a paragraph or just a few words. Great for repeated author queries, for your signature/address, paragraphs for emails and so on. The wording is always considered and polite, and it’s always spelled right, no matter how fast you’re going! If you don’t already use one, do check them out.
The Historical Thesaurus of English, University of Glasgow
With the conference in Glasgow, it would have been rude not to invite old CIEP friend Dr Fraser Dallachy to return and bring us up to date with goings on with the Historical Thesaurus, along with his colleague Beth Beattie. This time we had a tour of the visualisation tools that have been developed over the last few years.
The historical thesaurus is a huge boon to academics, who can see how individual words or classes of words, come into and fall out of use. That makes it also very useful for writers and editors of historical fiction who want to avoid anachronous vocabulary.
It’s just plain interesting for the rest of us. Who knew that ‘flim-flam’ is four hundred years older than the very recent coinage ‘tarradiddle’? Mind. Blown. I’d have said that ‘flim-flam’ was 1920s if you made me guess. Try 1570! I’d have thought tarradiddle might have been eighteenth, maybe nineteenth century. Nope. 1970. Mind. Blown. Again.
AI
The editorial world is awash these days with editors and proofreaders trying to get a handle on what natural language generators (ChatGPT and the like) mean for us. So naturally, in a conference themed ‘Language Matters’, AI had to be tackled head-on. I got to one such session, another is waiting for me as a recording, and I’d also attended an ACES (the US editing society) webinar on the topic a few weeks earlier.
It’s fair to say that reactions vary. There are those who are convinced it’s the end of civilisation as we know it, with machines replacing editors and proofreaders. There are those who say that AI cannot capture the human creative spark, our originality, and therefore we cannot be replaced. And there are those who find the middle ground.
The presentation I got to was of the view that AI is useful for highly defined, single tasks. Yet still, every suggestion that AI produces to change the text needs a human to review it and decide whether it’s accurate, appropriate and, indeed, an improvement at all. Use it for options, not solutions.
AI in language isn’t particularly new, despite the hype around ChatGPT since the end of 2022. Grammarly has been around since 2009, Word’s natural language Editor since 2010. In computing terms, that’s forevah!
We will also be keeping a close eye on it for the foreseeable future, but the biggest problem will be, in my view, that misunderstanding the public has – that I had – of what it can and can’t do.
Very basically, ChatGPT is a souped-up version of the predictive text on your phone. It can write things that sound plausible, but it can’t research, it has no understanding of what you’re trying to say (which is why Word’s Editor wanted me to change “Cleopatra’s bare arms” to “Cleopatra’s bear arms” – guess what language bank it had been trained on).
It can do an outline of a blog post, of an essay, of a best man’s speech. But it has no idea what it’s saying, and the outputs are not very good, and sometimes dreadful. You just give it a prompt and it guesses, but it phrases its guess like natural language, so you start to think it does understand. Nope.
If you rely on ChatGPT to write something for you, you’ll then have to spend far more time than you saved checking everything it’s said. I asked it for a 300-word bio, just for larks. It kept giving me 400 words. I wasn’t impressed. The content was so general, it could have applied to anyone (because it can’t do research. It also doesn’t understand that copyeditors are not the same beastie as copywriters).
I asked it to use UK English, so it just peppered the existing text with the word UK and left the US spelling and vocabulary.
That’s how dumb it is. Everything is generic and therefore inaccurate, because that’s all it can be right now.
Tools will doubtless come along that will take AI-generated language and editing places we can currently only fear, but for now, the important thing is to get the message out that it simply can’t replace human input at the writing, editing or proofreading stages, and you shouldn’t imagine it can. Yet.
Plagiarism
Tangentially allied to AI is the topic of detecting plagiarism. Plagiarism checkers also only look for existing word patterns out there on the interwebs. They can’t check for plagiarism of ideas, of structure, of artwork, by other authors. You need humans for that.
US editors Vee White and Andrea Klingler have been doing some research with authors, editors and publishers around the world to get a feel for how well plagiarism is understood, and how well prepared people are to find it and deal with the fallout.
The key to tackling plagiarism is education of authors when they are still students, further education via publishers’ instructions to their authors, and by the education of editors for spotting and then tackling plagiarism when it’s found.
Plagiarism can be deliberate – presenting other people’s ideas and/or words as your own, or taking a chunk of their text and switching out the occasional word to dodge plagiarism checkers (mosaic plagiarism). These tricks are dishonest and lazy, and have no place in the academic world, nor anywhere, for any kind of text. You could have your book or article pulled for breach of copyright, and face a hefty legal and damages bill. There is also the reputational damage to you, as the offending author.
Plagiarism can be accidental – keeping your research notes badly so you get notes from someone else’s book mixed up with notes of your own thinking as you work out your ideas. Or you may self-plagiarise. Just because you wrote it doesn’t mean you own the copyright to it, for one thing. And recycling text like this without acknowledgement and proper referencing could also be considered dishonest or unethical to a degree.
Finally, plagiarism can be deliberate and innocent simultaneously. In some cultures, it’s a mark of respect to reuse text from your teachers’ books. To suggest your teacher is insufficiently famous that people won’t immediately recognise that text is just plain rude, so you don’t add references and cite them. When cultures that frown on plagiarism (or sue you because of it) bump into cultures where it’s not plagiarism but respectful acknowledgement of the greatness of your teacher, well, it’s not pretty.
Education, as so often, is the key.
Grace Marshall on self-talk
The Language Matters conference closed with a plenary session from productivity coach Grace Marshall on shifting our mindset when everything is going wrong to a more open, curious approach that can keep things in perspective and avoid overwhelm, helping us to find a way out of the mess and remain productive.
Language matters, even when it’s inside our own heads.
