It’s been a while since I last blogged! My summer was filled with work, courses, and conferences. To begin with, I completed another course toward obtaining Queens University’s Professional Editing Standards certificate: Stylistic Editing, now renamed Copyediting Standards 2. This brings my total number of courses to three: Copyediting Standards 1, Fundamentals of Editing (completed this spring), and Copyediting Standards 2. I have two more courses to go before I can apply for the certificate! I also enrolled in a course from the Society for Editors and Proofreaders (SfEP) titled “Brush Up Your Grammar,” which I have almost completed.

As it turned out, whatever I learned from my courses could be put in practice right away, as my summer schedule filled up with work. I edited two academic monographs, eight journal articles, two dissertations, two book chapters, a conference paper, some blog posts, and even a card game! Thanks to the courses, I have become quicker at spotting issues, and I more readily know what to do about them. The issues I encounter are not just spelling and grammar errors, but also language that is not clear, coherent, or concise. It is nice to feel more confident in my abilities to spot and correct these instances!

My skills were honed even more by the conferences I attended this September: the Annual Conference of the SfEP and the Professional Development Day of the Society for English-language Professionals in the Netherlands (SENSE). While attending two conferences in such rapid succession was intense and left me feeling a bit drained, I am very happy that I went, because I met many people and learned a ton of stuff. I am working on detailed blog posts about these two conferences, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, I am booked up until the end of October at least, having started work for Terreform’s publishing imprint Urban Research on a forthcoming edited volume that I’m very excited about: an anthology of essays in honor of legendary urban theorist Mike Davis!