- I need to concede my “SfEP’s Sweariest Speaker” crown to Chris Brookmyre.
- Most editors are not brilliant at knowing the first lines of pop songs. Which meant our team won chocolate.
- If you’d like to get a cheap laugh, name your quiz team “Kevin”.
- It in fact was possible to love Emma Darwin more than I already did.
- My children might respond to my attempts to correct their English with “Mate, it’s just non-standard”. Well, if I’ve brought them up right.
- Speed networking is some hardcore shit. All I did was yell at people to change seats and I was exhausted.
- Also, one-minute warnings are useless if everyone’s speed-networking too hard to pay any attention to you.
- Failure is good, and everybody does it. Listening to other people’s tales of failure and coming back from it is reassuring and inspiring.
- Emoji use is already past its peak, and David Crystal wonders if in a few years we’ll be on to the next thing.
- The biggest Primark in the world is insanely huge, and does not sell flip flops out of season.
- You should try on your dress before you pack it. Ten minutes before a three-course meal is not a good time to discover you can no longer breathe in it.
- A spurtle is a stick you stir porridge with.
- Rights and Permissions Manager at a large publishing company is absolutely a job I never want to do.
- Because you need to do things like get permission from buildings to publish photographs of them. (Or someone who works on behalf of the building, I imagine. Not the actual building.)
- I did a lightning talk (I did not. This is a very specific in-joke that precisely three people will get).
- Speakers should probably Google any celebrity they aren’t familiar with but are mentioning in their talks, just to make sure they’re not currently facing charges for sex crimes.
- People are absolutely awful at remembering to use microphones to ask questions in sessions. (In amongst all my usual flippancy, this is a really serious point. People have hearing problems, and accessibility is not an optional extra.)
- The SfEP is about to become the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading! But something has to happen to some vellum or something first.
- You can put chilli in everything if you really want it bad enough.
- Writing a book is a painful process. Editing can be even more so, and there is a lot editors can do to make that worse or better for their authors.
- Only Jacob Rees-Mogg talks in semicolons.
- You’re only allowed 15 “fucks” in a BBC 3 radio play.
- When you chat to someone online nearly every day, it’s really weird when you sit down together and work out you’ve actually only met once, two years ago.
- A good editor is a detective, a spy, a linguist, and a sound mixer.
- Welsh is really old.
- Tiny changes to the way you think about and respond to things can make a big difference to your working practice, and therefore your life.
- Also, Liz Jones makes one hell of a beautiful PowerPoint slideshow
- Riffat Yusuf is absolutely the person to call should you need hilarious editing-related lyrics set to the tune of “He who would valiant be”.
- I spend waaaaay too much time online, judging by the number of times the response to my introducing myself was “Oh, I know you from Twitter!”
- Editors are still absolutely the best people. Thanks for a wonderful few days. I’ll see you all in Milton Keynes for hashtag SfEP2020 actual lol!
Like this:
Like Loading...
kiathomasediting.com 
1 thought on “30 things I learned at #SfEP2019”