ACES 2018
By Meredith Forrester
Every year for a few years before 2018, I’d either get up at 4am for three days in March-ish or fix my eyes on Twitter as much as possible during that time to keep up with everything announced, remarked upon, discussed, workshopped, considered and laughed about at the annual ACES: The Society for Editing conference, held in some faraway US city. At the end of 2017, when a book I’d just written was standing on a shelf at Readings and the ACES conference was set for Chicago in four months’ time, I decided that 2018 would be the year I’d do the conference IRL. Lynne Murphy giving a keynote! Henry Fuhrmann talking about the subtleties of -isms and prejudicial language! Mic’s copy chief, Kaitlyn Jakola, offering tips for copy editors to pivot to video! Bags: packed.
What follows are low-quality phone-camera highlights from my time at the ACES 22nd annual national conference in Chicago, plus a couple of surrounding moments on film. Proof of an Australian copy editor’s dream lived.
Windy. Oprah. After 21 hours of flying and one instance of nodding off on a stranger’s shoulder, I landed at O’Hare and rode the lift up to the top of the old Sears Tower to scope things out.
As the jet lag wore off, I wandered around and stumbled across the American Writers Museum, who welcomed us editors to Chicago with a Kurt Vonnegut quote. I spent three hours inside. I read a lot about American writers, most of whom I’d heard of and some of whom I jotted down to look up. I recommend a visit.
I also spent a good deal of time pretending to spot Dr Greene and Dr Ross snacking on the DuSable Bridge.
It was a good time of classic touristing. But that’s not what you’re here for!
It was time: day one of ACES 2018. I even found myself a decent, non-Starbucksy coffee in the Loop. Everything was coming up Meredith.
Hello, ACES! This is the welcome session. The Palmer House Hilton was ~fancy~ and I was surrounded by more editors than I have ever been surrounded by and the BuzzFeed copy team was sitting next to me and we were introduced to ACES scholarship winners and the organising committee gave us some good tips about making the most of the conference and then it was time for the three days of unadulterated joy to begin.
My first session, led by Hillary Warren, professor of communication at Otterbein University. This was for people who ‘miss the pleasure of sentence diagramming’ or ‘have only seen these unnatural acts on YouTube’. So as you can imagine, the room was packed.
After a quick chat about the benefits of diagramming and a general look at some bad sentences, we broke into groups and received one of the aforementioned bad sentences to chop up and stick back together on the wall, with all its building blocks connected and properly plotted out. Our sentence was very long, too long to rewrite, but this is it about halfway through. (On the left: the Northwest Editors Guild’s roving mascot, Giant Pencil.)
Here is not-my-group explaining their work. I can’t remember what their sentence was, but it looks well diagrammed. Straight main lines and more than a couple of modifiers … If you want to read more about this session, ACES blogged about it.
Over lunch, I read the conference booklet and found out that the CIA is looking for ‘Editors’ — capitals never mine — who know how to look.
Look!
Another great thing I did on day one was volunteer to sit on the books table. I only bought two or four of these books and I also worked the shift alongside Mark Allen, who is lovely and was a true help throughout the conference to this solo ACES first-timer. He also became the first person in the US to own a copy of my book.
Next session: deep grammar with Lisa McLendon, aka Madam Grammar. We discussed fused participles, nominative absolutes, double genitives and more fun stuff like that — and we ended on this gold nugget of advice: ‘Never give anyone an excuse to stop reading. Make it as smooth as possible. If we stumble, readers will stumble.’
Unfortunately for you, dear reader, I was so wrapped up in my third session — ‘Going rogue: using (and breaking) style rules to create a culture of conscious editing’ — that I didn’t take any photos of it. Fortunately for me, though, it was the most motivating and fist-pumping hour and fifteen minutes of my career. Thank you to copy chiefs and editors Kaitlyn Jakola and Ali Killian, then of Mic, and Daniel Toy and Sarah Schweppe, of BuzzFeed, for sharing their pro tips about how to navigate nuances and advocate for thoughtful language and decisions. This photo shows a moment during the ACES Education Fund spelling bee, held at the end of day one and hosted by Merriam-Webster’s Peter Sokolowski. I drank this one beer while fifteen copy editors took two hours to whittle themselves down to a winner. Not even the river or flower names had them stumped.
I told you the Palmer House Hilton was fancy. This is the bar at which I ended up tipping too much.
Day two. I’m back and so is this carpet …
… and these sight-blocking columns in Salon 5 that the conference organisers were very apologetic about. First session, day two: Paula Froke and Colleen Newvine taking us through the upcoming changes in the 2018 AP Stylebook, including no more hyphens in 3D, homepage as one word and a new entry for bulleted lists, thank goodness. In this zoomed-in photo you can see Colleen preaching the good word about lower-casing shouty company names and replacing their vanity symbols and marks with normal punctuation and human-reader styling. Refer to this tweet and try to tell me that editors don’t do important, culturally relevant work.
This session was great. Emmy Favilla read from her book A World Without ‘Whom’ and talked about building the BuzzFeed style guide. Around the time I took this photo I started to repeatedly kick myself because I’d left my paperback, Australian copy of Emmy’s book at the hotel so I had to buy a hardcover, US copy for Emmy to sign, but I now have two copies, one for notes and one that’s signed, so that’s actually good. Also, please buy or borrow and read Emmy’s book.
After lunch, I sat here as Peter Sokolowski, spelling bee host and Merriam-Webster lexicographer, explained the recent updates to MW’s online and collegiate dictionaries. A dictionary is an editor’s tool, and while I am loyal to my trusty Macquarie, this session brought the MW alive. I can’t remember why Peter showed this slide, but it’s of a book titled Meet Mr Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place), published in 1937, and I’m glad I looked through these photos because I’d forgotten that I need to get my hands on this book. Learn more: Merriam-Webster introduced former New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris to Mr Hyphen, and she calls the MW the ‘Little Red Web’.
Peter again! We’ve moved salons and skipped another undocumented session to find ourselves in the epicentre of style: the ‘Style guide superjam (or is it super jam?)’. The panel: Susan Wessling, senior editor for standards at the New York Times; Paula Froke, lead editor of the AP Stylebook; Carol Fisher Saller, editor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s Q&A; and Angela Gibson, the Modern Language Association’s director of scholarly education. The topic? Comparing and contrasting one another’s style rules and their favourite and least-favourite decisions from their own publication and another panel member’s. I can’t elaborate because I was sworn to secrecy. Sorry!
Day three. I’m still here. Now with extra Stop. Grammar Time. Actually, the night before, I volunteered at the silent auction and handed out items to winners and ate dinner with the other volunteers around a lone table in the middle of a big ballroom.
I failed to properly document day three. But that shouldn’t suggest a lack of enjoyment: from Merrill Perlman, I learnt what journalism can teach us about good editing; from Alysha Love, I learnt how to (try to) let go of perfectionism in editing, and what to put on my triage list. This here, though, is the final session of the conference, back in packed-to-the-walls Salon 5: ‘Edit sober: 79 tips for on-your-feet editing’ with Editor Mark. Mark crowdsourced the tips on Twitter and started with a solid favourite: ‘Look it up’. No one knows how many tips we made it through, but the vibes of generosity, camaraderie, motivation and in-it-togetherness filling this room are still with me today.
‘Every time you edit [well, you] bolster the profess[ion.]’ — Rob Reinalda. If there’s a more fitting quote to end the final session of a three-day editing conference, I don’t believe you.
Of course, there was an after party. This is the view across Millennium Park and out to Lake Michigan from the top of the Chicago Athletic Association. Thank you, ACES 2018 in Chicago, from one very happy and still-jazzed-up-a-year-later Australian copy editor.
PS. The next day, I couldn’t not.
PPS. The next day after that, I also couldn’t not.
If this looks like something you want to do too, the ACES 2019 conference is happening 28–30 March in Providence, Rhode Island. Sessions are up and the early-bird registration deadline is 11.59pm EST on Tuesday 15 January, which is 3.59pm AEDT on Wednesday 16 January here. If you want to save up or aren’t fussed about checking out Brown or RISD, ACES normally announces the next conference during the present conference, so we should know about the 2020 conference by April.
Sooner than 2020 and closer to home is the Institute of Professional Editors 9th national conference, running 8–10 May 2019 and featuring this keynote by The Good Copy’s own Penny Modra.
