ACES: On meeting people without meeting
Musing on Associations
During my public health career I have been involved in several associations. I was president of the public health tobacco control managers network by the time I was 30. I was a member of, a freelancer for, and then an employee of the Directors of Health Promotion & Education. I’ve spent the past six years as director of the National Physical Activity Society. Let’s say association work speaks to me, as I have found that having colleagues is one of the best parts of a career.
And it looks like I have entered another great field for association networking! Earlier this year I made plans to attend the spring conference of ACES: The Society for Editing in Salt Lake City. As anyone reading this knows, the world kind of imploded in spring of 2020, and the conference was canceled. Nevertheless, last Friday I joined 1,000 people on a series of free Zoom webinars, one of which featured a presentation called War of the Dictionaries by Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster. I tweeted about #ACES2020online all that day. The Grammar Arcana session with Lisa McLendon gave me new terms like ablaut reduplication, ditransitive verbs, and nominative absolutes. I’m set for stimulating party conversation if I ever come out of family isolation.
Then yesterday I once again took to Twitter for the regular #ACESchat with @GrammarGirl and @EditorMark (who led a Zoom happy hour preconference last week). I’ve been a Grammar Girl fan for a very long time; even went to see her when she came to town in the aughts. One thing I loved about this Twitter Chat was it was clear from the outset that Mark wanted everyone to participate: He had a goal of getting to 50 tips and didn’t expect that only he and Mignon would be offering them. Yay!
My own contributions seemed to speak to at least a few people.
Tips
Q1. What do you mean by edit sober? [Ed. note: From the saying “write drunk; edit sober,” attributed to various famous writers.] [My answer] A1: I've often said this, actually. To me it means you can write and write, but you should set it aside and come back to it another day for editing.
Tip: Learn advanced functions in Word. Wildcards can make the search-and-replace for double spaces a one-time click. #ACESChat
Brings up another favorite maxim of mine: "When in doubt, chop it out."
A weird but useful tip. In Firefox [Ed. note: Also other browsers], you can save to the Bookmarks Toolbar just the symbol of the frequently used web page. You can fit tons more on your toolbar. [This last one came with a picture, so I’ll link to it: https://twitter.com/PamEidson/status/1258131472856342529 ]
Back to Musings
Reaching out and meeting people in your field always takes effort, and I am new and unknown to the editing field. With the physical distancing, social media is now Way Number One to interact. It has its drawbacks, but I am already liking the people I’m meeting. I just hope Mark runs some more happy hours so we have more opportunities to talk!