Читать книгу Working Words - Elizabeth Manning Murphy - Страница 14

18

Variety is the spice of life, they say. Well, there has certainly been variety in the editing jobs that have come my way during my career. Let me share a few of them with you.

Think of me in the same category as a GP: no specialisation in any particular genre but enjoyment to be had from working in almost all – ‘almost all’ because there are a couple of exceptions. Documents that consist almost entirely of columns of figures, or statistics, or scientific material con­­taining huge quantities of numbers are not my favourites – my preference is to stick mostly to words with just occasional tables and other figures. Getting bogged down in massive tomes isn’t my idea of fun, so don’t ask me to edit The rise and fall of the Roman Empire or Gone with the wind or the Macquarie Dictionary, however fascinating they all may be – short and sweet provides my kind of variety.

Just looking through my records reveals a wide variety of editing jobs. Let’s start with the material for the 2001 Census – certainly a massive job, but consisting of many small and very interesting documents, ranging from contract documents through guides for collectors (including a fascinating and charmingly illustrated one for Indigenous collectors) to the forms you (or your parents) all completed in August 2001. That job included a great deal of tuition in points of grammar and plain English.

Then there was a set of leaflets setting out guidelines for procuring materi­­als for building purposes. The challenge here was to make the words clear to people from a non-English-speaking background. Another small ‘leaflet’ job was a newsletter put out by a musical group in Canberra – here it was helpful to have a musical background and know that foreign performers’ names need to be checked for spelling and that Mozart, and not Beethoven, wrote a particular symphony.

A fun one was a delightful booklet about the gardens around Parliament House in Canberra, written by the gardeners themselves and illustrated with drawings of some of the plants and birds that thrive in the gardens.

A difficult job was one concerning taxation. When has taxation ever been easy, you ask? This was about persuading industry that it was a good thing to comply with taxation requirements, and showing them how to do it, relatively painlessly. That job required all the diplomatic skills available to me.

Another job that taxed my personal resources was a massive one undertaken 19 with a number of other editors – project management skills were needed to manage a team of editors in Canberra and Melbourne.

My favourite job for several years was a military service annual. That consisted of many short articles written by serving men and women – all interesting. It could be done anywhere (and was, even while travelling around Australia and overseas). That job required me to think about the whole collection of very varied contributions, their grouping into sets, their placement so that they followed reasonably well on each other – all this apart from the editing, which needed a sense of overall design with text wrapping around photographs and so on. It was a challenge to make sure that the words would look good in the finished book.

A recent editing job has been a really interesting collaboration with an author in another state on behalf of a government department – a bit like the eternal triangle, and sometimes just as touchy. However, it all worked out, a couple of nice little booklets on a topic of concern to teachers and parents being the eventual outcome.

Editing jobs have included poetry, teaching materials, advertising flyers and brochures; books, manuals and leaflets; material written by people with English as a second language, as well as by native speakers of English; and documents ranging from the warnings on cigarette packets about the hazards of smoking to learned treatises such as PhD theses and articles for scholarly journals.

So, there’s been variety aplenty: straight editing, tuition, project management, design, diplomacy, large and small jobs, solo and team efforts, government and private sector documents. And that’s not counting the several writing and editing jobs that have been added to the mix just because they were really enjoyable to do – my monthly column for The Canberra editor, a series for Stylewise and a long-time commitment to the text and editing of the email newsletter and the website of a voluntary organisation.

Variety at work prevents boredom and makes you a more interesting person. More academic editing than anything else is coming my way as the years go by, but always interspersed with challenges of other sorts – like a short thriller novel that’s about to go to the printer. This variety is what keeps my brain ticking over!