CIEP conference 2022: Editing in a Diverse World

If it’s the second weekend in September, it’s the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading’s (CIEP) annual conference. Three days of editorial goodies, packed in tight.

Since the CIEP was formed from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders in 2020, on being awarded a royal charter, the conferences had been, perforce, online in 2020 and 2021. This year, however, an in-person conference was held in Milton Keynes for 110 people, with a couple of hundred attending online (including me), in our first-ever hybrid conference. (For stats lovers, the SfEP held the previous thirty conferences, 1990–2019 inclusive.)

Words matter

The theme of this year was ‘Editing in a Diverse World’ and one of the most thought-provoking sessions was the keynote Whitcombe Lecture by Katherine May, who explained the inaccuracy of autism being described only by those who view it from the outside, and get so much wrong. As a result, in large part, of those descriptions, she was decades late to realise that she herself is autistic – and she’s far from being alone in this.

And there it is, in a nutshell, the damage that words can do. That’s why, if you’re writing about a condition or a circumstance you do not have or is not yours, authenticity readers are essential.

Maximum accessibility

One of the joys of hybrid conferences is that everyone can get to all the sessions, even those running concurrently. As I write this, I know the recordings are on their way, so I haven’t yet seen the Reverend Richard Coles’s gala after-dinner speech, which I’m really looking forward to.

Poetry in motion

I was, however, there to see another luminary, the poet Ian McMillan, with his sidekick Luke (not-that-one) Goss on accordion, voice and didgeridoo, have the conference, online and off, in stitches, singing along, inventing their own songs on the spot, and performing punctuation semaphore – Victor Borge writ large. Except I don’t ever remember Victor Borge also talking about accent migration and isoglosses.

Katherine May and Ian McMillan bookended the conference, and indicate the breadth of coverage.

The editing and the proofreading

In between times, there was plenty of technical stuff, and I’m not going to list everything or go into much detail. The live sessions I Zoomed in for include websites that win clients (got a few things I need to tweak), working with international organisations, and efficient editing.

Another stand-out for me was Professor Lynne Murphy’s ‘Are editors changing the English language?’. You may have come across her wonderful blog Separated by a Common Language. Professor Murphy is American, living in England, and has been tweeting a ‘Difference of the Day’ since 2009 (@lynneguist). That’s a lot of differences between UK and US English.

She was at the conference (her fourth visit – we like her!) to talk to us about language densification. The word ‘the’ has dropped off a cliff in terms of frequency of usage over the last hundred years or so. ‘Of’ has dropped by 25% in the last two hundred years, ‘it’ had nearly halved in the last hundred. Why? Densification. Piling more meaning into fewer words, piling up nouns to turn ordinary writing into the kind of text you used to find only in newspaper headlines (sometimes to unintended comic effect).

Professor Murphy noted a speeding up of the loss of these small words from the early 1960s, as Strunk and White’s 1959 magnum opus Elements of Style (and for which I personally have no time <ducks>) got an iron grip on students and all kinds of writers in the United States – and beyond. That instruction to Omit Needless Words, the title of Principle 13 – to be pithy and meaning-dense – hit home.

Again, personally, I don’t mind a few strictly unnecessary words. They give the reader respite. Sure, it depends on tone, purpose, context, intended readership and so on (I trade as Apt Words, after all, not Few Words), but when the writing is so dense that it feels like you’re being slapped upside the head, it can never be a good thing. Concision can be taken too far.

Professor Nigel Harwood’s session on the ethics of proofreading (very broadly defined) for students was of particular interest – you’ll see elsewhere on this website that I don’t work on text that is to be marked. I wondered whether he would change my mind. Happily, he confirmed my biases. The ethics in this area are fraught, and there is precious little consensus on the bounds of acceptable intervention. I’m continuing to stay well clear!

(Why? I hear you ask. Well, I think students should be assessed on their own work, not their editor’s (or proofreader’s), and I dislike the idea that students who can afford to buy in assistance may end up with better marks than students who don’t have the cash to spare.)

The live session I was most looking forward to, however, got sidelined when I started a migraine ten minutes before the off! However, I shall see Claire Beveridge talk on nonfiction developmental editing soon, thanks to the wonders of modern tech.

What else? Something for everyone, as there should be in any good conference: live proofreading, developmental editing romantic fiction, editing sex scenes, conscious language, reducing the environmental impact of our businesses, working with self-publishers, neurodiversity, personal identity labels, using reference tools, a book discussion and much more, as well as oodles of networking opportunities in person in Milton Keynes, and online via the Spatial Chat app. And, of course, of course, the annual conference quiz (the online team I was in came joint fourth this year; last year it was first place. How the mighty are fallen…).

The warm and fuzzies

The collegiality in the CIEP is one of its great strengths. There are more than 2,300 members of the CIEP and, via our forums and our local groups, we do not compete, but support each other, and the world of editing.

The CIEP is the rising tide that lifts all editors’ boats, and at every conference, I’m reminded of how proud I am to belong to it.

Updated 28 June 2023