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Dear Ed archive
March 2009
Dear Ed
I'm concerned my editing skills will atrophy if I stop working in-house.
How can I keep my skills up-to-date?
Annette
Dear Annette
I'm beginning to think that someone is making up these letters. People get a bit dewy-eyed about what in-house training was like in the olden days but in my experience it was like one of those experiments with a loud buzzer, a rat and a maze, with the rat being a bewhiskered yours truly. (Which probably explains why loud buzzers still make me twitch.) Most of my in-house training involved copping a spray from the managing editor and/or publisher and/or design manager for not doing what I hadn't been told to do in the first place.
(And that probably also explains those gaps in my editing knowledge where I do things without quite knowing why I'm doing them: I was trained by learning not to repeat whatever I'd done previously that had merited a kick in the bum.)
Microsoft Word is your workbench. If it's set up on your computer the way it comes out of the box, then it's got enough default preferences to send you clear around the twist. If you want Word to work for you, as Clive Huggan puts it, 'first dumb it down, then smarten it up'. And if you don't know of Clive Huggan, start googling: the profit will be all yours.
I didn't learn how to use styles when I worked in-house because I didn't need to. But I discovered as a freelancer that styling and global changes could cut the donkey work and the hours involved on some jobs by 25 per cent, and styling suddenly became much more interesting. So, to get back to the point (in the vague hope that I've actually established a point), the best training is the training you undertake because you can see a need for it.
It amazes me that workplaces don't actually train their staff to use Word efficiently. It's like giving someone the keys to a new 18-wheel truck and saying 'Just follow your nose'. So check out the training sessions listed on the Society's website and look for anything that will teach you how to hotrod Microsoft Word.
Happy trails,
Ed