ACES Philadelphia

Beth Blair daily upholds the power of copy editing in an arena where copy editing is not so well understood or valued.
Blair, editorial team leader for the national office of the Boy Scouts of America, is the winner of  the 2009 American Copy Editors Society’s Robinson Prize.  The award was announced Friday night at the [...]

The University of Missouri School of Journalism is the recipient of the 2010 ACES Glamann Award for contributions to editing.
The third annual Glamann Award, which recognizes a person or group that has helped raise copy editing’s profile, was presented Friday night during the banquet at the 14th annual American Copy Editors Society conference in Philadelphia.
The [...]

Merrill Perlman offered editors tips on usage and language at her popular “Only if only I knew only” session.
Only may be a little word, but where you put it means a lot, Perlman said.
Put only closest to the word or phrase it’s modifying.
As Perlman pointed out, “Only I hit him in the eye” has an [...]

AP Stylebook editors David Minthorn and Darrell Christian took questions from a packed room at an afternoon session of the ACES conference today. But before they did, they addressed two style issues that had people tweeting like crazy.
In fact, crazy enough to be a trend.
The first was an announcement that plans to change the style [...]

Christine Steele and I were thrilled to see about 50 people attending our financial editing session. I think I may have gotten that many the first year I did this session, but only about 20 or 30 each year since. And this time I was even up against Merrill Perlman’s always-popular “If I Knew Only” [...]

Ruth Thaler-Carter has been a full-time freelance editor for several decades. Ten tips distilled from her talk:
* Keep connected to everyone. She got one job after attending a Halloween party hosted by a classmate from nursery school.
* Promote your specialized knowledge. She got one job because she was the only candidate who spoke Spanish.
* If [...]

“There are things that can be called rules and there are things that can be called rules for our purposes in the newsroom without actually being rules,” Walsh said. ” … Style is a means to an end. It is not and end unto itself.”

Besides taking down some myths, the message of the session was that style and other “rules” shouldn’t get in the way of clarity, and they shouldn’t make the newspaper sound pedantic. “Don’t treat the reader like an idiot,” Walsh said.

If there was any doubt as to how well copy editors have embraced the Web and social media, it was squashed at the “Ask the AP Stylebook Editors” session.
You could practically see the tweets and Facebook updates flying out of the room as, just before the start of a question-and-answer segment, editors Darrell Christian and [...]

Journalism educators are adapting to a rapidly changing industry, but it’s not easy to figure out what to teach the editors of tomorrow.  A panel, moderated by Andy Bechtel of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, suggested the approach to teaching editing must be broad.
“There is nothing that editing doesn’t touch,” said Deborah Gump, a [...]

The Free Library Festival  is being held this Saturday and Sunday. It’s a big book festival and it isn’t too far from the Loews (map). From the Festival Web site:
“Festival event photographs courtesy of Katie Riggan Now in its fourth year, the Free Library Festival is the Library’s annual burst of ideas and inspiration! Well [...]