Tutor focus - Anne Waddingham
Anne Waddingham trades as WordMedic ('Making words better') and has worked in STM publishing for over 30 years.
She specialises in tutoring, on-screen editing and project management. She authored the on-screen editing chapter in the 4th edition of Butcher’s Copyediting (CUP, 2006) and contributed to New Hart’s Rules (OUP, 2005).
Anne has been a tutor for the PTC for over 15 years, teaching courses such as Managing Editorial Freelances, Editing Scientific, Technical and Medical Texts and Editing in Word.
Was publishing always the career you wanted to pursue?
No, I can honestly say it never occurred to me. My school careers advisor in Devon said the only path open to me was teaching, which I roundly rejected. Ironic that I ended up teaching after all, albeit adults!
How did you first get into publishing?
I was keen to do ecology but few universities were offering it then (early 70s). One that did was the University of East Anglia, where I soon discovered that ecology seemed to be mostly about standing in freezing cold rivers measuring flow rates - whereas genetics, my other major subject, involved counting flowers on tomato plants in nice, warm greenhouses. I quickly switched! In my final year I saw an ad in NewScientist for an editorial assistant on Genetics Abstracts, published by Information Retrieval Ltd in central London and it seemed a good bet; and so I fell into publishing by accident.
Have you always worked in STM publishing?
IRL gave many people a foot in the publishing door, and I still bump into people who worked for them. They published tertiary journals in STM and the information age was just getting revved up – I vividly remember seeing our first (and only) modem, an old-style phone that you 'plugged into' rubber sockets. But after five years this country girl had had enough of working in 'the smoke', so I was pleased to get a job at Butterworth Scientific, in the bucolic surroundings of Borough Green in west Kent. So yes, I've always worked mainly in STM, although many of my editing jobs since going freelance have not been in that field. When you're self-employed you take whatever's on offer!
How long ago did you set up WordMedic?
After 10 years at Butterworths the company merged with Heinemann and moved to Oxford. It wasn't feasible for me to move so I took redundancy and set up my business in 1991 as Anne Waddingham Editorial Services (dull!) but changed it to WordMedic in 2003. My slogan, 'Making Word(s) Better' is supposed to allude to my expertise with MS Word as well as to my editorial skills but the parentheses soon got dropped.
What services does WordMedic offer?
As well as the usual editorial services - editing, proofreading and project management, the other main string to my bow has always been training.
What made you decide to work freelance?
After leaving Butterworths I was actually determined to forge a new career, and worked as a practice manager in a vet's for a short while, but I found that I missed publishing. Sharon Duckworth at Chapman & Hall offered me an editing job, then another turned up, then another, and I found that I was freelancing almost by accident.
What advice would you give to others thinking about doing the same?
I can honestly say that I haven't regretted being self-employed. The job is so varied - you never know what you might get offered next, and the training courses get me out and about, and stop that feeling of isolation that freelances often complain about. I certainly haven't missed the office politics, although I do occasionally pine for the banter around the coffee machine - the cats aren't great conversationalists.
How do you manage to divide your time between your various commitments?
Juggling one's work and family is a perennial headache, and I know I don't always get it right. A bone of contention in our family is my constant cry "I'll be done in 10 minutes!" then not emerging from my office for another three hours. I just can't leave anything unfinished. That's the main drawback of having a home office - it's always there calling to you. And on teaching days I'm totally focused - it has to be a major crisis to deflect me from that. Fortunately my husband is very supportive. I spend about half my time preparing and delivering training, the other half working on editorial projects.
What has been your greatest challenge in your career?
I can't say that any one thing stands out in my mind, though there have been lots of occasions when I've said yes to a job, wondering if I've bitten off more than I can chew, although it usually works out in the end. I'm a great believer in taking on new challenges as an opportunity to learn new skills. I started learning the cello 18 months ago, having never learnt music at all, and am very proud to have achieved grade 1, as well as participating in our local amateur orchestra. Onwards and upwards!
What has been your greatest achievement?
I was honoured to be invited to write the on-screen editing chapter in the latest edition of Butcher's Copyediting (CUP), the editor's "bible", and to revise two chapters in New Hart's Rules (OUP). Other than that, although I certainly wouldn't claim all the credit, I think that sometimes I see a ripple effect from the training that I do, in that some editorial and production practices seem to have changed for the better, or maybe it's just a trick of the light. I base this opinion on the fact that I often find my course anecdotes repeated back to me by people I've never met before! Something's getting through!
How did you first get involved with the PTC?
It's so long ago I can barely remember! Around 1987 I was invited to participate in a production course, while I was Editorial Manager at Butterworths, but it was only when I went freelance that I put together my first course.
While working in-house it was apparent that we needed to typeset our books direct from authors' files but I was increasingly frustrated by production disasters that arose from oft-repeated mistakes during the writing and editing stages. I was constantly at loggerheads with our production manager, who insisted that the problems justified his opinion that setting from disk would never work. When I took redundancy I finally had time to stand back and analyse what had been going wrong, as well as to learn more about the software tools that were available (in WordPerfect then) to make editing more efficient. I wrote a course called "Preparing Files for Publishers", which was aimed at authors and I taught it once at the Society for Authors. However, it was soon obvious that authors were not prepared to pay for training, so I turned the course on its head, called it "Taking Disks from Authors" and took it to Book House. I predicted that it would have a shelf life of five years because I was convinced that all the problems would be solved by then but it actually kept going for 13 years and elements of it still exist in my other courses. It's only in the past 5 or so years that I've seen a sea change in the attitudes of typesetters, who now welcome authors' files, instead of shunning them.
