Honorary president: Judith Butcher Honorary vice-president: David Crystal OBE

The SfEP conference: Some background

The aim of the SfEP annual conference is to give a place where people can meet face to face, train together and learn something new. It's a major event in the Society's calendar.

History

The SfEP itself started at a conference: the Society's founder asked for help in setting up a similar organisation for editors and proofreaders at the 1988 conference of the Society of Indexers. The SfEP was formed later that year, the first conference was convened in 1990, and there has been a conference every year since.

For more on the history of the Society, see Key dates in SfEP history.

Themes

Every year, the conference theme is set to give a focus for the whole proceedings:

2005  'One step beyond'
2006  'Meeting new challenges'
2007  'Learning is always in season'
2008  '20:20 vision: looking forward, looking back'
2009  'Editing in the 21st century'
2010  'Succeeding through innovation'
2011  'Skills, freelancing, Education, Practice'

Speakers

Distinguished guests speak every year on some aspect of language and publishing:

2005  Clarissa Dickson Wright
2006  Ian Ritchie CBE
2007  Andrew Franklin, Profile Books
2008  Charlotte Brewer, Oxford University
2009  David Crystal OBE
2010  Trevor Dolby, Preface Publishing
2011  Angus Phillips, Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, Oxford Brookes University

The conference programme

The programme incorporates workshops and seminars on new skills, technological change and revised advice on the basics, so delegates are regularly updated on software and software skills, manipulating tables, copy writing and rewriting, science and artwork editing, working in virtual teams, project management ...

Networking

Without conference, freelance and in-house editors rarely have the opportunity to meet each other. Many delegates attend every year simply in order to meet people they work with. Freelances, too, benefit from meeting each other, to swap experience and useful advice and, perhaps, to lay the foundations of creative partnerships in the future.

The conference dinner

The conference dinner is the annual knees-up, with fine food, entertainment and the yearly outing of the SfEP's chamber choir, the Linnets.

The bar

Here is a snippet from a delegate's blog for the 2008 conference: '... the usual suspects are found in the bar. New faces are welcomed, old friends exchange news ... We discuss the likelihood of the Higgs boson, the future of the book, the evolution of the language. Oh, those life-changing conversations you have in the bar at conference ...'

Conference planning

More than 100 delegates attend every year so we have a director and committee dedicated solely to overseeing conference planning. We meet at various venues in the UK in the first half of September. See what is being planned for next year's conference.