Ted Briggs: > The members of the societies of editors in Australia voted in Dec 2004 in > favour of introducing an accreditiation scheme for editors. That vote was > the culmination of several years of work which is still continuing, and I > think the first accreditation is still at least a year off. It is indeed a > long haul, for all the reasons that have been identified on this list. > However there is a definite commitment to making it work. Something a little more up to date: As Ted says, all state societies are committed to making it happen. Problems arise from the question of "how". Although IPEd (Inst of Professional Editors) is not yet formally constituted, it works as a forum for representatives of all state societies to get together and drive the development of accreditation and a few other things (notably including the biennial national editors' conference) besides. Off to one side -- responsible to the IPEd council but essentially autonomous -- is an accreditation board also with delegates from all state societies as well as one from the IPEd council itself. Under the board are a number of assessors (appointed by nomination as "distinguished editors" for the first round) who are working to see how they can make the process work. The process voted on in Dec 2004 turns out to be harder to implement than was thought at the time, because "editor" covers such a wide range of activities. (Sound familiar?) Editors at least have a set of standards (Australian Standards for Editing Practice) to define what an editor does; accreditation is fundamentally a process of certifying that an applicant can in fact operate to the level defined in the standards. I suggest that technical communicators start there. Not so different, really, from what was proposed a few minutes ago. Michael Lewis -------------------------------------- Brandle Pty Limited, Sydney, Australia www.brandle.com.au -------------------------------------- ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************