Advanced Copy-editing & Effective Project Management

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.