Time goes by

It was on October 23-25, 1997, that the American Copy Editors Society conducted its first national conference, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was there.

These photos, which recently surfaced in a folder deep in a file cabinet, were from the workshop I conducted there at the invitation of Pam Robinson.

"Getting Back to the Word," on issues of English usage, used material I had developed for staff workshops at The Baltimore Sun and from our in-house newsletter on writing and editing, Publish and Be Damned.

My participation in ACES had been encouraged by The Sun's publisher, Mike Waller, himself a former copy editor, and by John Carroll, the editor. When demand came for me to present this workshop, and others on writing and editing, their encouragement continued. I have presented "Getting Back to the Word" at other national ACES conferences and at publications around the United States.

Over the nineteen years since, as I have come to examine the things about English usage that I had been taught, looking at evidence in Bryan Garner's four edition of his usage manual, at the evidence presented by lexicographers and linguists about usage, and at the evidence of my own eyes,  the advice in that workshop has undergone revision.