Wed 3 February 2016 at 10.00 am
Rewriting and Substantive Editing
Andrew Steeds
Taking Place: The King’s Centre, Osney, Oxford
Increasingly, texts pose greater challenges than editors would expect to find in their standard copy-editing activity. How do you make a case for more-substantive editing than had been envisaged for a text? How do you set about reworking a text that doesn’t work in its submitted form? And how do you do so while keeping the person or people responsible for writing it on board? These, and other, questions are explored in Rewriting and Substantive Editing, a training course that presents ideas and strategies for making the process of rewriting less daunting than it can at times appear to be.
Course outline:
- Identifying problems and considering solutions
- When sentence construction breeds confusion
- Adjusting the level of a piece of rewriting
- Clarifying the message of a text
- Maintaining the author's voice
- The pros and cons of bullet points
- Approaches to cutting text
- Editing text written in English as a second language
- Considering jargon and specialist vocabulary
Date: Wednesday 3rd February 2016
Venue: The King's Centre, Osney Mead, Oxford
Tutor: Andrew Steeds has a background in writing and editorial consultancy. In addition to his work for the Migration Museum Project, he runs two companies – Simply Put Ltd and the Writing Clinic – that work with organisations to make public written communication clearer and more accountable. His work for both companies involves writing, project management, consultancy and training. He started off working as a teacher before going on to work in educational research and educational publishing. He was heavily involved in the publication of the then Department for Education and Skills’ adult core curriculum documents, including manuals on working with refugees and asylum seekers, and with EAL learners (learners with English as an additional language).
Price: £150