A Long-time Guild Member’s First ACES Conference
This year I joined ACES: The Society for Editing just in time for their annual conference in Providence, RI, on March 27-30, 2019. I pictured the trip as a pilgrimage to the New England of my youth, complete with grime on the streets, weeds growing up through cracks in the sidewalk, a vague smell of fish . . . Nope, nuttin’ like that.
Instead, it was about putting faces to institutions, such as Peter Sokolowski to Merriam-Webster or Helen Eby to the new Spanish Editors Association. Experiencing the buzz around AP style, particularly this year’s “gasp moment”: cutting hyphens from common constructions like “third grade teacher.” (I am sure glad most of my own clients prefer Chicago style!) The event was also about finding one’s place in the world of editors and freelancing. I definitely had the feeling of being among my people! Both Boston and Providence have seen major renovation since I lived there. A bonus: delicious food.
What We Learned at ACES 2018
Approximately a dozen Editors Guild members convened in Chicago with more than 700 other editors during the ACES 2018 conference April 26–28. ACES: The Society for Editing (formerly known as the American Copy Editors Society), a national organization for professional editors, hosts its annual three-day conference in a different U.S. city each spring.
The ACES conference is often the venue where the major style guides and dictionaries announce upcoming changes in spelling, style, and usage. It is especially well known as the conference where each year the Associated Press announces updates to its Stylebook in a room full of gasping and cheering editors. (The 2016 lowercasing of the word “internet” brought a mix of applause and disgusted harrumphs, while this year’s comparatively tame removal of the hyphen in “3D” didn’t cause nearly as many emotional reactions.)