It's day two of our spring blog relay and Hannah is revealing our inner office writing hang-ups and the challenges of editing our campaign information. Over the next couple months we'll be asking different Greenpeace staff and volunteers to write for our blog each day so that you can find out a bit more about the many different people, ideas and roles behind our campaigns.
I'm working on a new report that is written in a language known as Academia. As a Greenpeace editor I have to understand many jargon-based languages such as Academia, Environmentalish, Campaignese and translate them into Plain English to maximise readability.
My current assignment is: The case for including energy efficiency investment in the fiscal stimulus package (fiscal 1. of or relating to government revenue, especially taxes, 2. An African shrike with black and white plumage). The report talks about creating jobs and making money multitask, giving examples that prove how energy efficiency programmes have done this before. I was rather pleased that HEES was included as a case study, because a couple of years ago I earned my City & Guilds in energy awareness which focused on Warm Front which was born out of HEES.
Copyediting academic reports always includes a period of grappling with the content in order to make the crux of it more easy to communicate, but without - horror of horrors - dumbing it down.
It's actually a lot like gardening. I weed out words and phrases that either I don't understand (like, fiscal - I am not an economist!) or that don't really mean anything anyway (like, green collar - nobody around here wears green collars). Some of these words inevitably get put back in, but I attach an explanation. And some are put on a proverbial compost heap, which means that we - the rest of the publications team - discuss them until they really don't mean anything (like when you say the same word over and over again). Or our preferred option, we find a better way to explain it.
Next, I get to work on the punctuation and out go all the 'coward's commas' (I love that they're called coward's commas) nearly all the hyphens, most of the semi-colons and all the double spaces after full stops because we don't use typewriters anymore and we don't like snaking patterns down the page.
And then comes the important stuff (I am not, always, just a finicky word monkey) I have to make sure that the tone is right for the audience and right for Greenpeace. For example, we try not to refer to battles or fights, because Greenpeace is nonviolent. I also make sure that we are making solid recommendations and are clear about what we are asking for, because Greenpeace is all about solutions.
Next week, though, I may be designing a banner, a t-shirt, or - guided by our wonderful picture editors - choosing pictures for the next edition of our active supporter newsletter as well as more copyediting. I have to say, my favourite reason for copyediting to Plain English at Greenpeace, is that it demonstrates we do not have anything to hide. Greenpeace is transparent, we speak with words that are true. And for the proofreaders out there, Plain English does actually have a capital P and a capital E, I know this because I have a Plain English Campaign pen. There you go Tracy, you asked for geeky!
