28 – 29 June 2010 (Mon – Tue)
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National Library Building
100 Victoria Street, Singapore 188064
MAP | WEBSITE
Course Fee: $420.00
Editors looking to progress in their careers need to know more than the rules of punctuation and grammar. This stimulating workshop looks at the issues and problems that confront editors who work or want to work at a more advanced level and provides you with proven strategies to deal with the challenges that are faced by senior editors. Over one and a half days, the workshop will focus on three key areas:
- how to improve poor writing
- how to produce effective marketing and publicity material
- how to manage projects, including large ones, effectively
What Makes Good Writing
Junior editors learn to deal with poor grammar, poor punctuation and poor sentence structure but rarely are they taught what makes ‘good’ writing or how to recognise and deal with poor writing. This section of the workshop will look at how context and audience influence what a text should be: how genre and literary writing tend to differ from one another, and enable editors to judge what is appropriate for the publications they edit. In particular, you will look at three common problems:
- authors who repeat themselves
- authors whose writing is lazy
- authors who try too hard
You will learn how to implement such strategies as ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘less is more’.
When Editors Are Authors: Writing Effective Blurbs & Publicity Material
The second part of the workshop will deal with the part of an editor’s job that many editors find confronting: writing. This session will build on the analysis of poor writing and good writing from the earlier part of the day and look at the techniques used in effective persuasive writing. In practical exercises, you will write blurbs using the tested techniques learnt in the workshop.
Effective Project Management
The final part of the workshop will deal with what preoccupies many senior and managing editors: how to cope when things go wrong. You will learn about the particular importance of forward planning, and how to make schedules and calendars a tool rather than a trial. Finally, you will be introduced to the need to adaptable when the best-laid plans fail: being an effective microchange manager is the often the key to being an effective
editorial manager, and practical solutions for some specific real-life problems—such as discovering typos on the contents page of an advance copy—will be discussed.
About the Trainer: Susan Keogh
Susan Keogh has more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. She has worked in-house as an editor, publishing manager and editorial manager for Melbourne University Press, Lonely Planet and Cambridge University Press.
She is a Distinguished Editor member of the Australian Institute of Professional Editors Assessors Forum (the group that has developed and assesses the national editors’ accreditation examination) and she is an honorary life member and former president of the Society of Editors in the Australian state of Victoria.
She currently works as an editorial and publishing consultant for corporations and publishing companies, and teaches in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Postgraduate Diploma in Editing and Publishing.
Registration Details
Registration is on a first-come-first-served basis and workshop fees must be paid before the workshop. If the minimum number of participants is not met for the class, the organisers will inform all participants about possible postponement and cancellation, two weeks before the workshop date.
Cancellation & Substitution
The workshop can be cancelled or postponed two weeks before the workshop date if the minimum number of participants is not met. Participants will be fully refunded for workshops cancelled by us.
Participants who are unable to attend a workshop they have registered for are to inform us of the reason two weeks before the workshop date. They will be fully refunded in the event of extenuating and mitigating circumstances (E.g. illness, bereavement, accidents) . Those who inform us up to five (5) working days before the workshop date will receive a 50% refund. Participants can also attend another course at the same value within the same year.
Upon registration, you are deemed to have read and understood the cancellation, withdrawal and substitution policy and accept the terms contained therein.